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
paul_mccartney_and_michael_jackson is a musical artist	1111	06-jul-2018	99.0
n11_32_pm is a time	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
concrete_thinking_vs_abstract_thinking is a cognitive action	1111	06-jul-2018	99.9
contact_residence is a book	1111	06-jul-2018	93.8
jim_calhoun is an athlete	1111	06-jul-2018	99.9
adventures is a generalization of rafting	1111	06-jul-2018	93.8
cha_seung_baek is an athlete that flied out to position center	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
p_j__brown is a person also known as aaron_rodgers	1115	03-sep-2018	100.0
youth_hockey is a sport with fans in the country __america	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
jaco_pastorius is a musician who is part of weather_report	1115	03-sep-2018	96.9