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
carlos_carrasco is an athlete	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
soy_protein_powder is a food	1111	06-jul-2018	98.3
alfred_prescott is a monarch	1111	06-jul-2018	96.8
_10 is an award, championship, or tournament trophy	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
heavy_equipment_mechanic is a profession	1111	06-jul-2018	98.7
cattle is an animal that is a kind of larger_animals	1112	24-jul-2018	97.0
head a muscle located in bodypart paws	1116	12-sep-2018	99.8
national is a bank in uganda	1114	25-aug-2018	100.0
bucharest is the capital city of the country romania	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
ski is a sport taught in the country india	1115	03-sep-2018	100.0