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
cabbage_like_leaves is a vegetable	1111	06-jul-2018	93.9
unibody_aluminum is a building material	1111	06-jul-2018	98.2
mchenry_illinois is a geopolitical entity that is a location	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
sawyer_county_record is a newspaper	1111	06-jul-2018	91.5
lymph_nodes_remicaid is a lymph node	1111	06-jul-2018	99.5
scorpions is an animal that is a kind of spiders	1111	06-jul-2018	93.8
chevrolet makes the automobile caprice	1114	25-aug-2018	100.0
zachary_taylor is a U.S. politician who holds the office of secretary	1115	03-sep-2018	93.8
international_business_machines_corp is an organization known by the acronym ibm	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
air_national_guard is headquartered in the country us	1116	12-sep-2018	99.6