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
mama_thai_restaurant is a restaurant	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
lymphectomy_lymphoidectomy is a medical procedure	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
tufted_tailed_rat is a mammal	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
soybean_dwarf_virus is a virus	1111	06-jul-2018	99.6
fentermine is a drug	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
chicken is an animal that eats rosemary	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
nissan makes the automobile nissan_pathfinder	1114	25-aug-2018	100.0
carroll plays the athletic team position left_field	1113	15-aug-2018	93.8
selene is the mother of ersa	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
rick_neuheisel coaches the team ucla	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0