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
flowering_plant is a plant	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
cherokee_darter is a fish	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
taser_device is a weapon	1111	06-jul-2018	98.2
orosi_lodge is a place to ski	1111	06-jul-2018	90.7
lou_piniella is a person	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
harrisburg is the capital city of the state or province pa	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
kob_tv is a TV affiliate of the network nbc_news	1116	12-sep-2018	98.4
mallinckrodt is a company headquartered in the city saint_louis	1116	12-sep-2018	98.4
mbia is headquartered in the state or province new_york	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
recluse_spider is called spider_bite	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0