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
edible_or_rock_crab is a crustacean	1111	06-jul-2018	99.7
congressional_bill is a legislative bill	1111	06-jul-2018	94.6
loans_for_farm is a farm	1111	06-jul-2018	99.8
english_and is a language	1111	06-jul-2018	99.8
old_bay_fries is a food	1111	06-jul-2018	98.0
evan_solomon was born in the state or province california	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
henry001 has citizenship in the country luxembourg	1113	15-aug-2018	98.4
feline_friends is an animal that preys on cat	1113	15-aug-2018	98.4
vanessa_paradis has husband johnny_depp	1116	12-sep-2018	99.2
mary is the parent of yeshua	1115	03-sep-2018	98.4