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
major_rice is a grain	1112	24-jul-2018	94.6
harvard is a school	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
himachal_himalayas is a mountain range	1111	06-jul-2018	99.8
snowboarding_boots is a kind of clothing	1111	06-jul-2018	91.7
softball_batting_gloves is sports equipment	1111	06-jul-2018	95.2
spiders is an arthropod as well as small_arthropods also is	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
fredo and michael are siblings	1113	15-aug-2018	93.8
william_jefferson_clinton is a U.S. politician endorsed by the U.S. politician bush	1113	15-aug-2018	93.8
st___louis_cardinals is a sports team that plays the sport baseball	1116	12-sep-2018	99.9
marvin_williams is an athlete coached by mike_woodson	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0