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
mount_aberdeen is a mountain	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
all_hammers_and_hammer_drills is a tool	1112	24-jul-2018	99.2
pathology_of_the_lymph_nodes is a lymph node	1111	06-jul-2018	99.8
streptomyces_asterosporus is a bacterium	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
michael_hogan is an African person	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
n0 is the number of people injured in the event chappaquiddick_incident	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
francis_slay is the leader of the city st_louis	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
cocoa is an agricultural product that is usually cooked with salt	1113	15-aug-2018	93.8
eiar_vaage died in the country norway	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
jason_frasor plays the sport baseball	1116	12-sep-2018	99.2