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
overnobleness is a physical characteristic	1112	24-jul-2018	100.0
hot_fudge is a food	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
growth_redwood_forest is a fruit	1112	24-jul-2018	95.3
n2005_meeting is a music festival	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
metastatic_malignancies is a disease	1111	06-jul-2018	91.3
robot_futures is part of scs_author_presentation___booksigning	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
conservative_party is a person who has residence in the geopolitical location new_york	1114	25-aug-2018	98.4
deer is a type of various_animals	1115	03-sep-2018	93.8
the country lebanon uses the currency pounds	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
boston_braves is a sports team that plays the sport football	1116	12-sep-2018	93.7