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
britney_spears is a female	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
thorn_tree is a plant	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
froots_magazine is a magazine	1111	06-jul-2018	99.9
sport_management_students is a victim	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
server_hosting_provider is a sports team position	1111	06-jul-2018	99.4
flannels is a clothing item to go with hat	1111	06-jul-2018	98.4
john_steinbeck wrote the book the_red_pony	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
contact_the_ministry is a synonym for services	1111	06-jul-2018	93.8
subway is a transportation system located in the city nueva_york	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
screen looks like n3_	1112	24-jul-2018	99.6