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
times_license is a political blog	1111	06-jul-2018	91.5
joya_winery is a winery	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
personal_selling is an item found on a table	1111	06-jul-2018	99.9
unroasted_coffee_beans is a legume	1111	06-jul-2018	99.1
rick_ramos is an Australian person	1111	06-jul-2018	94.3
will_wynn is the leader of the city austin	1116	12-sep-2018	97.4
brown_recluse_spiders is called spiders	1111	06-jul-2018	96.9
philip is a musician who plays the guitar	1115	03-sep-2018	99.8
cal_ripken_jr is a person also known as jr_smith	1115	03-sep-2018	100.0
alicia is a person who has attended the school state_university	1113	15-aug-2018	99.2