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
conor_jackson is an Australian person	1111	06-jul-2018	98.7
arteria_ciliaris_anterior is an artery	1111	06-jul-2018	99.7
population_this_study is a research project	1111	06-jul-2018	98.7
n3_0000 is a programming language	1111	06-jul-2018	96.6
seed_potatoes is a fruit	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
hepatic_artery arises from left_gastric_artery	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
barry_sanders is an athlete who wins heisman_trophy	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
tom_barrett is the leader of the city downtown_milwaukee	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
joe_nathan plays for the team twins	1116	12-sep-2018	99.8
hong_kong_special_administrative_region is a country also known as china	1111	06-jul-2018	98.4