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
movie_shawn_of_the_dead is a movie	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
manor_seafood_restaurant is a restaurant	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
ohio_valley_college_of_technology is a university	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
n28_2 is a performance metric used by machine-learning scientists	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
simple_mold is a fungus	1111	06-jul-2018	97.0
pork_jowl is related to pig	1114	25-aug-2018	100.0
beverages is an agricultural product that contains beverages	1113	15-aug-2018	99.2
paul and lord_jesus are family members	1113	15-aug-2018	93.8
demarcus_ware plays for the team oklahoma_state	1116	12-sep-2018	99.2
brown_recluse is a synonym for spiders	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0