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
hotel_sachsenhof is a place to ski	1111	06-jul-2018	90.7
jon_anderson is a musical artist	1111	06-jul-2018	99.0
britney_spears is a female	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
pumpkin_cubes is a visualizable thing	1111	06-jul-2018	96.3
phase_iii_studies is a research project	1111	06-jul-2018	98.6
princess_street is a street in the city edinburgh	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
soluble_fiber can cause blood_cholesterol_levels	1114	25-aug-2018	96.3
david_beckham plays the athletic team position player	1112	24-jul-2018	96.9
lehman_brothers is headquartered in the city nueva_york	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
william_cohen is in the academic field computer_science	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0