Read the Web
Research Project at Carnegie Mellon University

NELL: Never-Ending Language Learning

Browse the Knowledge Base!

Can computers learn to read? We think so. "Read the Web" is a research project that attempts to create a computer system that learns over time to read the web. Since January 2010, our computer system called NELL (Never-Ending Language Learner) has been running continuously, attempting to perform two tasks each day:

• First, it attempts to "read," or extract facts from text found in hundreds of millions of web pages (e.g., playsInstrument(George_Harrison, guitar)).
• Second, it attempts to improve its reading competence, so that tomorrow it can extract more facts from the web, more accurately.

So far, NELL has accumulated over 50 million candidate beliefs by reading the web, and it is considering these at different levels of confidence. NELL has high confidence in 2,810,379 of these beliefs — these are displayed on this website. It is not perfect, but NELL is learning. You can track NELL's progress below or @cmunell on Twitter, browse and download its knowledge base, read more about our technical approach, or join the discussion group.

Recently-Learned Facts

instance	iteration	date learned	confidence
brent_briscoe is a male	1111	06-jul-2018	90.7
blow_your_face_out is a musical album	1111	06-jul-2018	99.9
floor_standing_bath_mixer_tap is an item often found in a bathroom	1111	06-jul-2018	99.9
the_merchants_and_farmers_bank_of_salisbury is a bank	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
support_award is a film festival	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
baseball is a sport played in the venue miller_park	1112	24-jul-2018	100.0
acura is a specific automobile maker dealer in canada	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
crickets is an arthropod that looks like grasshoppers	1114	25-aug-2018	100.0
chinese_language is the language of the country china	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
san_francisco was damaged in the event n1906_san_francisco_earthquake	1112	24-jul-2018	100.0