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
face_shapes is a geometric shape	1111	06-jul-2018	94.5
prescription_psoriasis is a muscle	1112	24-jul-2018	99.8
disorder_population is a physiological condition	1111	06-jul-2018	90.3
movie_the_glass_house is a movie	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
sofa_sleeping is a household item	1111	06-jul-2018	91.8
yankees is headquartered in the state or province texas	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
bosnia_herzegovina is a synonym for yugoslav_federation	1111	06-jul-2018	93.8
crickets is an arthropod as well as insects also is	1114	25-aug-2018	99.9
british_air is a company also known as bbc	1114	25-aug-2018	100.0
barclays is a bank that has bob_diamond as its CEO	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0