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
fennel_leaves is a vegetable	1111	06-jul-2018	92.2
n63_kilometers is a non-sports, non-electronic game	1111	06-jul-2018	90.4
burlington_college is a university	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
spilling is a physical action	1111	06-jul-2018	94.8
third_consecutive_record is a political blog	1111	06-jul-2018	99.2
snails is a type of organisms	1113	15-aug-2018	99.6
the home stadium of kris_versteeg is wrigley_field	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
management is an academic program at the university institute	1114	25-aug-2018	100.0
spring is an organization dissolved at the date april	1112	24-jul-2018	100.0
yoko_ono has husband john_lennon	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0