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
greenville_hospital_system_university_medical_center is a hospital	1111	06-jul-2018	90.6
darren_murphy is an author in the scientific field of machine learning	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
holy_comforter_episcopal_church is a place of worship	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
palestinian_president_yasser_arafat is a terrorist organization	1111	06-jul-2018	99.5
spruce_bud_scale is an invertebrate	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
greg_bear wrote the book darwin_s_radio	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
enoch and jared are family members	1113	15-aug-2018	100.0
red_wings is a sports team that won the stanley_cup	1113	15-aug-2018	100.0
amy has husband john	1116	12-sep-2018	96.9
nuts is an agricultural product produced in __america	1116	12-sep-2018	99.2