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
furniture_moulds is a fungus	1111	06-jul-2018	90.5
lateral_femoral_cutaneous is a nerve	1111	06-jul-2018	97.6
potatoes_potatoes is a fruit	1112	24-jul-2018	99.2
plastic_tube is an item found in the kitchen	1111	06-jul-2018	99.2
grass_webworm is an insect	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
national is a bank that bought dsp_merrill_lynch	1114	25-aug-2018	100.0
mother is the mother of joseph001	1115	03-sep-2018	100.0
nissan is a company that produces pathfinder	1114	25-aug-2018	97.1
the country lebanon uses the currency pounds	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
poe001 was born in boston	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0