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
tylectomy is a medical procedure	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
genprobe_inc is a biotech company	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
kosovo is an organization	1114	25-aug-2018	100.0
plane_polygons is a geometric shape	1111	06-jul-2018	93.8
kevin_schwartz is american	1111	06-jul-2018	91.5
mcpherson001 was born in washington___d___c__	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
spider_mites is a type of insects	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
j_p__howell is a person also known as p_j__brown	1115	03-sep-2018	100.0
tim_russert is a person who died at the age of 58	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
khartoum is the capital city of the country sudan	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0