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
breakfast_biscuits is a baked good	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
headaches_and_swollen_lymph_nodes is a lymph node	1111	06-jul-2018	99.5
conjunction_engineering is an area of study within the field of machine learning	1111	06-jul-2018	99.9
dodge_aspen_fuel is a model of automobile	1111	06-jul-2018	99.2
n1_20 is a performance metric used by machine-learning scientists	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
london_stansted_airport is a generalization of temple_of_the_reclining_buddha	1114	25-aug-2018	100.0
josh_freeman plays the sport football	1116	12-sep-2018	90.7
fedor_tyutin plays for the team rangers	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
southern_miss_lady_golden_eagles is an organization known by the acronym southern_mississippi_golden_eagles	1115	03-sep-2018	100.0
chinese is a language used in the university ohio_state_university	1116	12-sep-2018	96.9