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
streptomyces_asterosporus is a bacterium	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
unknown_magazines is a kind of media	1111	06-jul-2018	99.3
james_a__pawelzyk is an astronaut	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
__americans is an ethnic group	1111	06-jul-2018	93.6
sun_community_credit_union is a bank	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
melbourne_museum is a museum in the city melbourne	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
cells is a subpart of the body within tumor	1111	06-jul-2018	99.6
acco_brands is a company also known as kensington	1114	25-aug-2018	93.8
springfield is the capital city of the state or province illinois	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
the companies youtube and video compete with eachother	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0