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
spruce_tree is a plant	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
sly_boogy is a musical artist	1111	06-jul-2018	92.4
all_species_information is a scientific term	1111	06-jul-2018	95.7
imaging_printing is form of visual art	1111	06-jul-2018	98.1
carthage_republican_tribune is a blog	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
the companies the_chicago_tribune and new_york compete with eachother	1111	06-jul-2018	99.9
mauna_kea is a mountain in the state or province hawaii	1116	12-sep-2018	96.9
zimmerman has brother martin	1116	12-sep-2018	99.2
steve is a subpart of microsoft	1111	06-jul-2018	99.8
paramount_hotel is a hotel in the city new_york	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0