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
mohen_naorem is a writer	1111	06-jul-2018	91.2
karen_shook is a professor	1111	06-jul-2018	91.2
sure_the_trees is a plant	1111	06-jul-2018	94.8
nc_state_university is a sports team	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
leesburg_animal_park is an aquarium	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
arachnids is called scorpions	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
braden_looper plays the sport baseball	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
dry_bean is related to india	1115	03-sep-2018	100.0
football_players is a generalization of donovan_mcnabb	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
five is the number of people injured in the event one_passenger_reported_dead_and_over_40_injured_as_coach_crashes_into_hedge_at_looe	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0