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
page_fill is an office supply	1111	06-jul-2018	95.4
comments_related_posts is software used by machine-learning scientists	1112	24-jul-2018	99.2
locarno is a city	1111	06-jul-2018	99.8
center_purchases is a sports team position	1111	06-jul-2018	98.9
advocacy_record is a political blog	1111	06-jul-2018	98.8
right_common_carotid arises from brachiocephalic_trunk	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
britain is a country also known as china	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
ob_gyn is an academic program at the university college	1112	24-jul-2018	93.8
mcpherson001 is a person who belongs to the organization abc	1112	24-jul-2018	99.9
kalamazoo_river is a lake in the state or province michigan	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0