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
cheese_chicken_breast_recipes is a recipe	1111	06-jul-2018	99.7
extension_study is a research project	1111	06-jul-2018	99.4
community_meeting is a perception action	1111	06-jul-2018	91.8
barley_seeds is a grain	1112	24-jul-2018	96.5
valeri_polyokov is an astronaut	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
new_school is a university in the city nueva_york	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
kvoa is a TV station in the city tucson	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
lewis is a politician who holds the office of president	1113	15-aug-2018	99.6
bugs is called dragonflies	1111	06-jul-2018	96.9
john_bonham is a musician who is part of led_zeppelin	1115	03-sep-2018	100.0