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
sendai_city_museum is a museum	1111	06-jul-2018	96.3
cancer_the_cancer is a disease	1111	06-jul-2018	92.1
drug_last_month is an archaeon	1111	06-jul-2018	91.0
alfalfa_leaves is a vegetable	1111	06-jul-2018	91.7
noisomeness is a physical characteristic	1113	15-aug-2018	100.0
treasury_department is headquartered in the country u_s_	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
center is a role for players of hockey	1111	06-jul-2018	93.8
daryle_ward is the parent of gary_ward	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
pacific_ocean is a lake in the state or province alaska	1116	12-sep-2018	99.0
jerusalem is a city also known as ashdod	1112	24-jul-2018	93.8