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
phone_hire is an item found on a table	1111	06-jul-2018	91.8
caws_preseli_cheese is a cheese	1111	06-jul-2018	97.5
school_and_constitutional_amendment_election is an election	1111	06-jul-2018	96.8
esenboga_airport is a transportation port	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
exchange_exchange is an economic sector	1112	24-jul-2018	99.8
joshua was born in jericho	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
football_players is a generalization of kerry_collins	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
brewers is a sports team that played in series	1112	24-jul-2018	100.0
english is the language of the country hong_kong	1114	25-aug-2018	100.0
the sports team eventual_super_bowl_champion_new_york_giants was the winner of n2008_super_bowl	1116	12-sep-2018	96.9