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
northwest_ohio_center is a hospital	1111	06-jul-2018	98.1
lancashire_black_bomb_cheese is a cheese	1111	06-jul-2018	96.1
glenmore_inn is a place to ski	1111	06-jul-2018	90.1
boyaca_department is a state or a province	1111	06-jul-2018	98.4
siu_edwardsville_cougars is a sports team	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
steven_derounian belongs to the ethnic group armenian	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
hard is a generalization of rock	1112	24-jul-2018	93.8
national is a bank that bought bank_of_baroda	1114	25-aug-2018	100.0
saturn is the parent of uranus	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
emend is a drug worked on by merck	1114	25-aug-2018	99.2