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
red_plum_tomatoes is an agricultural product	1111	06-jul-2018	99.3
currencies_exchange is an economic sector	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
prescription_breast is a muscle	1111	06-jul-2018	99.5
army_black_knights is a sports team	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
three_sports is a sport	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
kmbc is a TV station in the city kansas_city	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
english is the language of the country us	1115	03-sep-2018	100.0
leto is the mother of apollo	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
steve_schalchlin and whitney_houston are family members	1112	24-jul-2018	100.0
insects feeds on snails	1114	25-aug-2018	100.0