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
pterygopharyngeal_muscle is a muscle	1111	06-jul-2018	99.5
diapriidae is a mollusk	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
cheese_quesadillas is a visualizable thing	1111	06-jul-2018	96.3
home_flow is a location	1111	06-jul-2018	96.7
left_wing_workers is a trade union	1112	24-jul-2018	90.7
two_men participated in the event crimes	1113	15-aug-2018	99.2
wto is a company headquartered in the city geneva	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
great_moose_lake is a lake in the state or province maine	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
silvestre_heerrera belongs to the ethnic group mexican	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
countries is a generalization of korea	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0