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
mango_dressing is a food	1111	06-jul-2018	98.0
alfred_kirwa_yego is a monarch	1111	06-jul-2018	99.1
sedgwick_pontiac is an automobile manufacturer	1111	06-jul-2018	94.9
one_crab is a crustacean	1111	06-jul-2018	99.9
stink_bug is an invertebrate	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
cali is a city located in the country colombia	1116	12-sep-2018	93.8
european_airports is a generalization of london_city	1115	03-sep-2018	100.0
il is a company in the economic sector of insurance	1114	25-aug-2018	100.0
new_england_patriots_17_14 is headquartered in the state or province new_york	1116	12-sep-2018	93.8
belgium is a country also known as china	1111	06-jul-2018	93.8