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
ann_casey ia a celebrity	1111	06-jul-2018	90.6
history_the_federal_government is an academic field	1111	06-jul-2018	98.5
cmj_magazine is a magazine	1111	06-jul-2018	99.9
earl_s_honey_mustard_barbecue_sauce is a condiment	1111	06-jul-2018	99.8
facilities_dining is a visualizable thing	1111	06-jul-2018	96.2
brown_recluse_spider is an arthropod as well as spiders also is	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
black_pepper is an agricultural product that is usually cooked with olives	1114	25-aug-2018	99.6
kurt_warner and ryan are teammates	1112	24-jul-2018	93.8
john_foster_dulles and allen_dulles are siblings	1113	15-aug-2018	93.8
rob_ford is the leader of the city toronto	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0