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
honey_brown_hair is a personal care product	1111	06-jul-2018	98.5
national_encounter_party_or_pen is a political party	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
pallas_study is a research project	1111	06-jul-2018	97.8
black_moshannon_creek is a trail	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
blood_pressure_drugs is an archaeon	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
basketball is a sport played in the venue time_warner_cable_arena	1115	03-sep-2018	100.0
michael_moore directed the movie sicko	1115	03-sep-2018	99.9
mike_mularkey coaches in the league nfl	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
rob_zombie is a musician who is part of white_zombie	1116	12-sep-2018	97.8
cape_town is the capital city of the country south_africa	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0