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
burley_tobacco is a food	1111	06-jul-2018	97.5
steel_wiresection_steel is a building material	1111	06-jul-2018	96.7
tertians is an ethnic group	1111	06-jul-2018	94.7
heinrich_maria_davringhausen is a scientist	1111	06-jul-2018	99.9
julie_yeh_feng is an Asian person	1111	06-jul-2018	99.9
hockey is a sport with fans in the country india	1115	03-sep-2018	100.0
patrick_mcgoohan is a person who died at the age of 80	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
abt is a company also known as abbot_laboratories	1114	25-aug-2018	100.0
gainesville is a subpart of florida	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
washington_d_c_ is a city also known as saint_louis	1113	15-aug-2018	100.0