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
luciana_bean is a legume	1111	06-jul-2018	97.9
premature_ejaculation_premature_ejaculation is a physiological condition	1111	06-jul-2018	93.1
josh_copeland is a North American person	1111	06-jul-2018	91.2
kristen_aldridge is an actor	1111	06-jul-2018	91.2
light_feel is a perception event	1111	06-jul-2018	91.1
crows is an animal that eats seeds	1115	03-sep-2018	100.0
kuow_fm is headquartered in the city seattle	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
whitney is a museum in the city new_york	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
viagra is a drug worked on by pfizer	1114	25-aug-2018	100.0
post is a newspaper in the city central_london	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0