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
knoxville_news_sentinel_farm is a farm	1111	06-jul-2018	99.9
non_native_species is a plant	1111	06-jul-2018	99.9
us_beginning is a geopolitical entity that is an organization	1111	06-jul-2018	94.5
easy_bruising is a disease	1111	06-jul-2018	94.0
n5_8__ is a machine-learning algorithm	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
edwards is a male person who moved to the state (or province) washington	1113	15-aug-2018	100.0
telegraph is related to www_miamiherald_com	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
mcpherson001 was born in washington___d___c__	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
carbon is a chemical that is a kind of companies	1111	06-jul-2018	99.2
via_christi is a hospital in the city wichita	1116	12-sep-2018	93.8