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
hhs_food is a food	1111	06-jul-2018	98.6
balkarians is an ethnic group	1111	06-jul-2018	90.8
echinocytes is a type of biological cell	1111	06-jul-2018	97.6
n2_5___year is a machine-learning algorithm	1111	06-jul-2018	99.4
berry_avenue is a highway	1111	06-jul-2018	90.4
wibc is a radio station in the city indianapolis	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
lenny_moore plays the athletic team position running_back	1113	15-aug-2018	100.0
battersea_park_zoo is a zoo in the city central_london	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
system001 is a subpart of the body within cells	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
dominique_rodgers_cromartie plays for the team cardinals_27_23	1116	12-sep-2018	98.4