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
bear_creek_canoeing is a hobby	1111	06-jul-2018	99.2
tent_caterpillars is an invertebrate	1111	06-jul-2018	99.3
battle_of_honkaniemi is a military conflict	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
five_mortar_rounds is a weapon	1111	06-jul-2018	96.6
deployment_capacity is a character trait	1111	06-jul-2018	99.6
seattle_seahawks_21_10 is a sports team that won the superbowl	1113	15-aug-2018	100.0
robert and samuel are siblings	1112	24-jul-2018	93.8
nyse is a company also known as new_york_stock_exchange	1113	15-aug-2018	100.0
david_brooks is a journalist that writes for the publication times	1111	06-jul-2018	93.8
siemens is a company in the economic sector of engineering	1114	25-aug-2018	100.0