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
aleksand_r_aleksandrov is an astronaut	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
white_bleu_des_causses_cheese is a cheese	1111	06-jul-2018	94.3
jacqueline_thompson is an Australian person	1111	06-jul-2018	91.2
emeraude_hotel_louvre_montana is a place to ski	1111	06-jul-2018	90.7
n12088 is a ZIP code	1111	06-jul-2018	99.8
dragonflies is an animal that preys on bugs	1111	06-jul-2018	93.8
bed is often found in accessible_room	1115	03-sep-2018	99.8
chicken is an animal that eats rosemary	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
overkill is a musician in the genre metal	1114	25-aug-2018	93.8
blastocystis is a bacteria that causes blastocystosis	1114	25-aug-2018	100.0