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
much_grass is a vegetable	1111	06-jul-2018	98.2
spartan_stores_inc is a retail store	1111	06-jul-2018	99.6
inhibitor_of_dna_binding_2 is a protein	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
thunderstorm_activity is an event	1113	15-aug-2018	92.1
cheese_quesadillas is a visualizable thing	1111	06-jul-2018	96.3
baseball is a sport played in the venue pnc_park	1114	25-aug-2018	100.0
george_carlin was born in the country us	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
holy_roman_emperor has citizenship in the country germany	1112	24-jul-2018	93.8
maritime_administration is headquartered in the country us	1116	12-sep-2018	93.8
mr__smith is a person who belongs to the organization state_university	1111	06-jul-2018	99.6