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
salad_lettuce is an agricultural product	1111	06-jul-2018	99.2
government_administration_and_elections_committee is a political organization that is not part of the government	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
www_dragoncon is a convention	1111	06-jul-2018	99.9
home__d is a location	1111	06-jul-2018	98.9
cotton_plant is a plant	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
dave_navarro is a musician who is part of jane_s_addiction	1115	03-sep-2018	96.9
geoffrey_rush starred in the movie shine	1115	03-sep-2018	96.9
n11 is the number of people that died in the event n1999_bourbonnais__illinois__train_accident	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
n250_rockets is a type of weapon produced in israel	1114	25-aug-2018	99.9
native_english is the language of the country us	1115	03-sep-2018	96.9