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
ricarda_bean is a fruit	1111	06-jul-2018	98.8
massachusetts_general_hospital_and_mclean_hospital is a hospital	1111	06-jul-2018	97.9
ventral_spinothalamic_fasciculus is a nerve	1111	06-jul-2018	97.2
overseas_filipino_workers is a trade union	1111	06-jul-2018	90.7
n03_06_2009 is a dataset used within the scientific field of machine learning	1112	24-jul-2018	100.0
judo is a sport taught in the country _uk	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
leto is the mother of apollo	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
cliff_floyd is an athlete who led new_york_mets	1116	12-sep-2018	93.8
mike_porcaro is a musician who is part of toto	1113	15-aug-2018	96.9
salmon is a fish that can be served with the food rye_bread in a meal (or dish)	1114	25-aug-2018	100.0