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
instructions_recipes is a recipe	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
deep_lilac is a color	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
cotton_plant is a plant	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
accupuncture_and_positive_thinking is a cognitive action	1111	06-jul-2018	99.9
reviews_software is a tool	1111	06-jul-2018	99.3
japanese_language is spoken in the city tokyo	1113	15-aug-2018	100.0
football_players is a generalization of ben_roethlisberger	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
scott_schoeneweis is an athlete that flied out to position center	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
european_nations is a generalization of spain	1115	03-sep-2018	99.2
annihilator is a musician in the genre thrash_metal	1111	06-jul-2018	99.1