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
bladder_stones is a disease	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
polk_county_judge is a judge	1111	06-jul-2018	97.4
reuben_noble_lazarus is a male	1111	06-jul-2018	94.7
tear_gas_canisters is a weapon	1111	06-jul-2018	97.5
cocoa_spice_snackin__cake is a baked good	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
tarantulas is an arthropod as well as spiders also is	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
joshua was born in jericho	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
china is a country located in the geopolitical location member_countries	1111	06-jul-2018	93.8
anne_perry wrote the book the_sins_of_the_wolf	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
new_south_wales is the location of the event n2011_christchurch_earthquake	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0