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
femoral_trochlea is a bone	1111	06-jul-2018	91.6
equipment_toroidal_components is a tool	1112	24-jul-2018	99.4
comment_information is a scientific term	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
robert_ashton is a politician	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
iclx is a conference	1111	06-jul-2018	98.7
prince has citizenship in the country monaco	1114	25-aug-2018	100.0
mick_jones is a musician who is part of the_clash	1112	24-jul-2018	93.8
plain_dealer is a newspaper in the city cleveland	1116	12-sep-2018	96.9
ray is a musician who plays the drums	1112	24-jul-2018	100.0
bed is often found in bedroom_studio	1111	06-jul-2018	93.8