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
to_the_masseter_muscle is a muscle	1111	06-jul-2018	99.4
two_sticks is a visualizable object	1111	06-jul-2018	98.5
links_links_tylenol is a criminal	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
doll_furniture is a kind of furniture	1111	06-jul-2018	99.8
ngangela is an ethnic group	1111	06-jul-2018	95.2
rittenhouse was born in the city philadelphia	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
nv is a company in the economic sector of insurance	1113	15-aug-2018	93.8
london_stansted_airport is a generalization of temple_of_the_reclining_buddha	1114	25-aug-2018	100.0
wqow_tv is a TV affiliate of the network abc_news	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
rover is a specific automobile maker dealer in _uk	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0