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
world_class_fishing is a sport	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
narcotic_drugs_and_psychotropic_substances is a legislative bill	1111	06-jul-2018	90.7
love_flowers is a retail store	1111	06-jul-2018	91.0
n3_779 is a dataset used within the scientific field of machine learning	1111	06-jul-2018	91.7
capex_investment is an economic sector	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
voltaire wrote the book candide	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
pudding can cause cancer	1115	03-sep-2018	100.0
ksci is a TV station in the city los_angeles_ca	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
tricep a muscle located in bodypart arm	1111	06-jul-2018	98.4
indians is a sports team that plays the sport baseball	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0