Read the Web :: Carnegie Mellon University

NELL: Never-Ending Language Learning

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.

instance	iteration	date learned	confidence
son_of_frankenstein is a book	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
soap_molds is a fungus	1111	06-jul-2018	90.7
gettysburg_magazine is a magazine	1111	06-jul-2018	99.8
the_view is a political blog	1111	06-jul-2018	98.8
mohen_naorem is a U.S. politician	1111	06-jul-2018	91.2

spiders is an arthropod as well as black_widow_spiders also is	1111	06-jul-2018	96.9
rogaine is a drug having the side effect side_effects	1116	12-sep-2018	93.8
sen__john_mccain is a U.S. politician endorsed by the U.S. politician gov__sarah_palin	1113	15-aug-2018	100.0
downtown_phoenix is the capital city of the state or province arizona	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
lancome is headquartered in the country france_france	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0

Read the Web
Research Project at Carnegie Mellon University

NELL: Never-Ending Language Learning

Recently-Learned Facts