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
use_american is an ethnic group	1111	06-jul-2018	95.0
prodotti_farmaceutici is a wine	1111	06-jul-2018	99.3
senator_schumer is a U.S. politician	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
lower_grain is a grain	1111	06-jul-2018	90.5
radio_matter is a household item	1111	06-jul-2018	96.6
usc is a sports team that plays against boston_bruins	1111	06-jul-2018	98.6
arms is a type of weapon produced in china	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
christian_bale contributed to the creative work batman	1114	25-aug-2018	93.8
baseball is a sport played in the venue invesco_field_at_mile_high	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
raymond_james is the home venue for the sports team bay	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0