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
lotte_hotel is a tourist attraction	1111	06-jul-2018	94.5
the_iliad_and_the_odyssey is a book	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
joyce_svitak is an African person	1111	06-jul-2018	90.9
n8_5_victory is an event outcome	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
alfred_mcnamara is a monarch	1111	06-jul-2018	96.4
tea is an agricultural product produced in us	1115	03-sep-2018	99.6
cells is a subpart of the body within cord_blood	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
luol_deng plays for the team chicago_bulls	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
sharks is a type of vertebrates	1115	03-sep-2018	100.0
large_herds refers to more than one buffalo	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0