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
green_village_road is a highway	1111	06-jul-2018	93.9
actinomadura_malachitica is a bacterium	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
us_post_office_express_mail is a retail store	1111	06-jul-2018	99.7
edwards_lake is a trail	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
los_angeles_university_cathedral is a place of worship	1111	06-jul-2018	99.9
gotoh_museum is a museum in the city tokyo	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
god_the_father and mary are family members	1111	06-jul-2018	98.4
universe participated in the event result	1113	15-aug-2018	96.9
visiting_assistant is a synonym for studies	1111	06-jul-2018	98.4
black_pepper is an agricultural product that is usually cooked with salmon	1114	25-aug-2018	99.6