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
beacon_fell_traditional_lancashire_cheese is a cheese	1111	06-jul-2018	96.8
battle_of_hill_881 is a military conflict	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
loud_clock is an item often found in a bedroom	1111	06-jul-2018	99.9
lentectomy_lesionectomy is a medical procedure	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
douglas_mcgrath is a Canadian person	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
alice has husband richard	1116	12-sep-2018	99.2
milos_forman directed the movie cuckoo_s_nest	1115	03-sep-2018	93.8
driskill_mountain is a mountain in the state or province louisiana	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
west_virginia hired bob_huggins	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
national is a bank that bought deutsche	1114	25-aug-2018	100.0