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
follow_up_phase is a non-disease physiological condition	1111	06-jul-2018	96.7
world_war_ii_farm is a farm	1111	06-jul-2018	99.8
sharp_ribbed_salamander is an amphibian	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
pointe_magazine is a newspaper	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
n1951_mlb_all_star_game is a sports game	1111	06-jul-2018	99.9
grand_lake is a lake in the state or province oklahoma	1116	12-sep-2018	99.6
tim_burton directed the movie batman	1115	03-sep-2018	100.0
arnold_schwarzenegger is a U.S. politician who holds the office of governor	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
insects is a type of crickets	1114	25-aug-2018	100.0
the companies manchester_guardian and new_york compete with eachother	1111	06-jul-2018	93.8