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
nieuwegein is a visualizable scene	1111	06-jul-2018	99.4
comments_cats is software used by machine-learning scientists	1111	06-jul-2018	99.6
l__obesity is a disease	1111	06-jul-2018	92.1
joanna_bean is a legume	1111	06-jul-2018	98.2
spicy_raisin_coffee_cake is a baked good	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
ricky_williams is an athlete who wins heisman_trophy	1113	15-aug-2018	100.0
black_pepper is an agricultural product that is usually cooked with vegetables	1114	25-aug-2018	100.0
citigroup is a company headquartered in the city nueva_york	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
the companies fastcompany and journal compete with eachother	1111	06-jul-2018	93.8
browns_stadium is a tourist attraction in the city cleveland	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0