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
capitellidae is a mollusk	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
threads_magazine is a newspaper	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
burley_tobacco is a food	1111	06-jul-2018	97.5
bethel_road is a street	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
volunteer_undergraduate_students is a victim	1111	06-jul-2018	93.7
forestry is an academic program at the university college	1112	24-jul-2018	98.4
vince_carter coaches the team new_jersey_nets	1116	12-sep-2018	99.8
westferry is a park in the city central_london	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
jack_kevorkian is a person also known as doctor_death	1115	03-sep-2018	100.0
moses and paul001 are siblings	1114	25-aug-2018	93.8