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
barley_seeds is a grain	1112	24-jul-2018	96.5
barrier_islands_gazette is a blog	1111	06-jul-2018	99.9
trade_unions_rights is a socio-political term	1111	06-jul-2018	95.9
gould is american	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
lymph_nodes_in_leg is a lymph node	1111	06-jul-2018	99.5
robert_quine is a musician who plays the guitar	1115	03-sep-2018	93.8
pets is an animal that preys on spiders	1111	06-jul-2018	99.6
johnny_weissmuller starred in the movie tarzan	1115	03-sep-2018	93.8
dee_brown and williams are teammates	1112	24-jul-2018	93.8
china is a country located in the geopolitical location foreign_countries	1112	24-jul-2018	100.0