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
battle_of_johnstown is a military conflict	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
natural_childbirth_educator is a job position	1111	06-jul-2018	94.7
doljo_beach is a beach	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
robert_percival is a scientist	1111	06-jul-2018	91.4
lymph_nodes_colar_bone is a lymph node	1111	06-jul-2018	99.1
st__louis_cardinals_catchers_yadier_molina has citizenship in the country italy	1115	03-sep-2018	100.0
pests is an animal that is a kind of spiders	1111	06-jul-2018	93.8
crickets is a type of insects	1114	25-aug-2018	100.0
paul_gillmor died in the state or province virginia	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
scorpions is a musician in the genre rock	1113	15-aug-2018	99.9