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
willingham_s_mild_bar_b_que_sauce is a condiment	1111	06-jul-2018	99.9
n06_15_2009 is a dataset used within the scientific field of machine learning	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
literature_journals is a kind of media	1111	06-jul-2018	99.7
edwin_encarnacion is a Mexican person	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
cool_valentine is a person	1111	06-jul-2018	99.4
space_shuttle_astronauts is a generalization of john_young	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
john_schlesinger directed the movie midnight_cowboy	1112	24-jul-2018	93.8
ford is a company that produces explorer	1114	25-aug-2018	100.0
the country arab_countries uses the currency dollars	1116	12-sep-2018	93.8
abram is the parent of ishmael	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0