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
personal_computing is an item found on a table	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
sliced_green_onions is an agricultural product	1111	06-jul-2018	99.2
heart_disease_etc_ is a disease	1111	06-jul-2018	91.3
terms_study is a research project	1111	06-jul-2018	98.8
view_more_information is a scientific term	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
hockey is a sport played in the venue st__pete_times_forum	1112	24-jul-2018	100.0
emirates_durham_international_cricket_ground is related to emirates	1114	25-aug-2018	100.0
sheraton_los_angeles_downtown_hotel is a hotel in the city los_angeles_ca	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
spiders is called brown_recluse_spider	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
cells is a subpart of the body within body_needs	1111	06-jul-2018	93.8