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
flat_bones is a bone	1116	12-sep-2018	99.6
cathedral_priory is a place of worship	1111	06-jul-2018	99.8
battle_of_logiebride is a military conflict	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
manganese_gluconate is a drug	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
evening_telegraph is a blog	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
bodies is a subpart of the body within system	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
black_pepper is an agricultural product that is usually cooked with cilantro	1114	25-aug-2018	99.2
creatures is an animal that preys on spiders	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
victoria is the capital city of the state or province bc	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
chevrolet makes the automobile lumina	1114	25-aug-2018	98.4