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
mercury_zephyr_engines is a kind of automobile engine	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
sex_change_procedures is a cognitive action	1111	06-jul-2018	99.9
robin_cohen is an author in the scientific field of machine learning	1111	06-jul-2018	99.9
tapas_pan_set is an item found in the kitchen	1111	06-jul-2018	99.3
westmoreland_gmc is a company	1111	06-jul-2018	95.6
venus_williams is an athlete who beat lindsay_davenport	1114	25-aug-2018	100.0
dragonflies is an animal that is a kind of predators	1111	06-jul-2018	93.8
english is the language of the country zambia	1114	25-aug-2018	97.2
ryan is a person who moved to the state california	1115	03-sep-2018	100.0
kenwood_house is a park in the city central_london	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0