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
clark_lake_station is a train station	1111	06-jul-2018	99.6
shortribs is a visualizable thing	1111	06-jul-2018	97.5
tim_marx is a North American person	1111	06-jul-2018	91.3
n6_18_pm is a time	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
carmel_baird is a CEO	1111	06-jul-2018	94.3
beer is an agricultural product produced in china	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
crabs is a type of crustaceans	1115	03-sep-2018	100.0
china_development_bank is a bank in china	1111	06-jul-2018	93.8
john_steinbeck wrote the book the_winter_of_our_discontent	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
nelson_mandela is a person who has age 90	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0