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
erica_dahm is a fashion model	1111	06-jul-2018	91.5
asia is a continent	1114	25-aug-2018	100.0
purple_colour is a visualizable attribute	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
tomato_slices is an agricultural product	1111	06-jul-2018	99.9
bay_floor is an item often found in a hallway	1111	06-jul-2018	99.7
ted_lilly plays for the team chicago_cubs	1116	12-sep-2018	99.8
oil_dressing is a generalization of lemon	1113	15-aug-2018	93.8
phil_condit is the CEO of boeing	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
washington_dulles is an airport in the city washington_d_c_	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
ants is an invertebrate animal that feeds on seeds	1115	03-sep-2018	100.0