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
blueside_shiner is a fish	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
argentina_car is a product	1111	06-jul-2018	90.6
n12_04 is a performance metric used by machine-learning scientists	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
tretinoin_emollient_cream is an archaeon	1111	06-jul-2018	91.3
michigan_governor is a kind of office held by a politician	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
the country us uses the currency dollars	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
butte is a city located in the state or province montana	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
astrakhan is a city located in the geopolitical location russia	1113	15-aug-2018	99.8
son_philip has citizenship in the country spain	1113	15-aug-2018	93.8
generic_versions_of_tiazac is expected to come to market on n2002	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0