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
outside_magazine is a newspaper	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
luciana_bean is a legume	1111	06-jul-2018	97.9
venous_vessels is an artery	1111	06-jul-2018	99.5
class_capacity is a character trait	1111	06-jul-2018	99.6
m_night_shyamalan is a male	1111	06-jul-2018	90.3
cedars_sinai is a hospital in the city los_angeles_ca	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
oriole_park_at_camden_yards is a tourist attraction in the city baltimore	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
marshawn_lynch plays for the team bills	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
nigeria is a country also known as china	1111	06-jul-2018	93.8
kurt_warner and ryan are teammates	1112	24-jul-2018	93.8