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
steve_hackney is an astronaut	1111	06-jul-2018	99.9
westside_hospital is a hospital	1111	06-jul-2018	92.8
prescription_acid is a muscle	1111	06-jul-2018	99.7
small_intestine is a part of the body	1111	06-jul-2018	95.3
n08_06_2009 is a dataset used within the scientific field of machine learning	1112	24-jul-2018	100.0
boston is the home city of the sports team boston_college	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
joyce was born in chicago_south	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
football_players is a generalization of peyton_manning	1114	25-aug-2018	100.0
swords is a type of weapon produced in china	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
cc_sabathia is an athlete who wins world_series	1115	03-sep-2018	100.0