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
trials_clinical_trials is a research project	1111	06-jul-2018	99.0
riverside_hills can be a part of a landscape	1111	06-jul-2018	99.3
eastern_pine_weevil is an insect	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
caroline_road is a street	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
adirondack_hunting is a hobby	1111	06-jul-2018	99.5
father is the father of lord	1116	12-sep-2018	91.8
nyc is a city located in the geopolitical location national	1114	25-aug-2018	99.6
the companies the_globe_and_mail and los_angeles compete with eachother	1111	06-jul-2018	98.4
usc hired lane_kiffin	1111	06-jul-2018	96.9
dogs is an animal that preys on larger_pets	1112	24-jul-2018	100.0