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
n10_11_2003 is a dataset used within the scientific field of machine learning	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
optima_winery is a winery	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
couch_table is a kind of furniture	1111	06-jul-2018	99.7
spacious_studio_rooms is an office building room	1111	06-jul-2018	97.5
shot_glasse is an item found in the kitchen	1111	06-jul-2018	99.6
the sport baseball was played at n1995_world_series	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
ford is a company that produces ford_mustang	1114	25-aug-2018	100.0
european_countries is a generalization of spain	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
xml_feed_tweet_seattle_mariners is a sports team that played in two_games	1113	15-aug-2018	93.8
lenny_moore plays the athletic team position running_back	1113	15-aug-2018	100.0