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
alfalfa_blotch_leafminer is an invertebrate	1111	06-jul-2018	95.6
ickw is a conference	1111	06-jul-2018	99.5
sir_john_geilgud is a North American person	1111	06-jul-2018	91.5
line_study is a visualizable attribute	1111	06-jul-2018	90.9
porcine_circovirus_type is a virus	1111	06-jul-2018	95.2
ronald_reagan is a U.S. politician who holds the office of former_assistant_secretary	1115	03-sep-2018	99.2
herodotus is in the academic field history	1115	03-sep-2018	100.0
management is a type of science	1114	25-aug-2018	100.0
arunachal_pradesh is a sate or province located in the country india	1116	12-sep-2018	99.2
basketball is a sport played in the venue wachovia_spectrum	1114	25-aug-2018	100.0