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
digastric_branch is a nerve	1111	06-jul-2018	99.2
jeremy_miller is an African person	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
contact_leader is a book	1111	06-jul-2018	92.3
andreas_g__hofmann is an author in the scientific field of machine learning	1111	06-jul-2018	99.9
u__s__commerce_department is a part of the government	1111	06-jul-2018	94.5
dragonflies is an animal that is a kind of creatures	1111	06-jul-2018	99.9
saint_louis_rams is a sports team that plays in the league nfl	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
clint_eastwood is a person who belongs to the organization carmel_by_the_sea	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
snails is a type of mollusks	1113	15-aug-2018	99.8
praying_mantis is an arthropod that feeds on insects	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0