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
_13 is a year	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
region_of_lymph_nodes is a lymph node	1111	06-jul-2018	99.2
donald_j__ross coaches a sports team	1111	06-jul-2018	99.0
heart_disease_etc_ is a physiological condition	1111	06-jul-2018	91.7
pharmacy_students is a victim	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
south_east_asia is a synonym for china	1111	06-jul-2018	93.8
bucharest is the capital city of the country romania	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
wool_caps is a clothing item to go with shirts	1111	06-jul-2018	93.8
giuliani is a U.S. politician who holds the office of mayor	1115	03-sep-2018	100.0
spiders is an animal that is a kind of predators	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0