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
smith_family_farm is a farm	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
lymph_nodes_in_jaw is a lymph node	1111	06-jul-2018	99.7
liberal_activist is a profession	1111	06-jul-2018	96.2
democratic_force_or_fd is a political party	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
aravali_hills is a mountain range	1111	06-jul-2018	99.9
soft_drinks is an agricultural product that contains corn_syrup	1112	24-jul-2018	99.6
lake_blackshear is a lake in the state or province georgia	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
holey_grail___the_mechanism_of_transport_through_the_nuclear_pore_of_cells occurrs at the date april_17__2013	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
indinavir is a drug worked on by merck	1114	25-aug-2018	100.0
blackberry is a product that is a kind of smartphones	1113	15-aug-2018	100.0