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
four_star_rating is a physical action	1111	06-jul-2018	97.3
rachna_gilmore is a writer	1111	06-jul-2018	91.3
rissoidea is a mollusk	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
roger_johnson is an author in the scientific field of machine learning	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
givens_pond is a lake	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
flag is a synonym for left	1111	06-jul-2018	98.4
u__s is headquartered in the country u_s_	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
cells is a subpart of the body within bovine	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
the country jamaica uses the currency dollars	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
usa_today is a newspaper in the city new_york	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0