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
harakat_al_shuhada_a_al_islamiyah is a terrorist organization	1111	06-jul-2018	99.3
unembarrassedness is an emotion	1111	06-jul-2018	97.8
saline_county is an airport	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
jacobs_road is a street	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
william_wallis is a chef	1111	06-jul-2018	99.9
quicken_loans_arena is related to wews_tv	1114	25-aug-2018	100.0
the companies united_states_postal_service and air compete with eachother	1111	06-jul-2018	93.8
spiders is called scorpions	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
ramon_santiago held the position of infielder	1115	03-sep-2018	100.0
black_pepper is an agricultural product that is usually cooked with salmon	1114	25-aug-2018	99.6