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
acacia_blossoms is a plant	1111	06-jul-2018	99.8
david_amann is a director	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
massachusetts_general_and_brigham is a hospital	1111	06-jul-2018	92.3
j_r__tolkein is a writer	1111	06-jul-2018	91.5
the_republic is a political blog	1111	06-jul-2018	99.0
n3_51am is the time of the event one_dead__30_injured_in_southern_pakistan_quakes	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
o_hare_intl is a generalization of temple_of_the_reclining_buddha	1114	25-aug-2018	100.0
steve_bruce is a person who has residence in the state or province california	1115	03-sep-2018	100.0
jerusalem is a city that lies on the river jordan_river	1112	24-jul-2018	93.8
abraham and lot are siblings	1112	24-jul-2018	93.8