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
sabine_ehrenfeld is a Canadian person	1111	06-jul-2018	91.2
n01_13_2008 is a date	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
cerebral_commissural_fibers is a kind of brain tissue	1111	06-jul-2018	98.1
shovel_headed_treefrog is an amphibian	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
bilateral_trade_agreement is a TV show	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
n400_employees is a synonym for board	1111	06-jul-2018	93.8
androscoggin_lake is a lake in the state or province maine	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
indianapolis is the home city of the sports team indiana_university	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
john_steinbeck wrote the book of_mice_and_men	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
nelson_mandela is a person who has age 90	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0