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
pierce_s_food_mart is a retail store	1111	06-jul-2018	99.5
osama_bin_laden_al_qaeda is a terrorist organization	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
follitropin_alfa is a drug	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
john_gatens is a writer	1111	06-jul-2018	91.5
representative_elijah_cummings is a politician	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
vodafone terminated the employment of arun_sarin	1114	25-aug-2018	100.0
gore_vidal contributed to the creative work myra_breckinridge	1113	15-aug-2018	100.0
robert_altman directed the movie mash	1116	12-sep-2018	96.9
pudong is a city that lies on the river huangpu	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
ksvi is a TV affiliate of the network abc_news	1116	12-sep-2018	93.8