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
study_antibiotics is an archaeon	1111	06-jul-2018	91.0
light_music is a record label	1111	06-jul-2018	91.2
first_fellowship_community_baptist is a religion	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
honey_mustard_barbeque_sauce is a condiment	1111	06-jul-2018	99.8
cisco_restaurant is a restaurant	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
jeff is a person who has attended the school college	1114	25-aug-2018	98.4
mother is the mother of elizabeth	1116	12-sep-2018	93.8
roskilde is a city located in the country denmark	1116	12-sep-2018	96.9
ryan and matt_schaub are teammates	1111	06-jul-2018	93.8
tv_actors is a generalization of lisa_kudrow	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0