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
church_of_god_of_the_seventh_day is a religion	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
nih_study is a research project	1111	06-jul-2018	99.4
n2_1_overtime_defeat is an event outcome	1111	06-jul-2018	99.9
information_personal_data is a scientific term	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
ichneumon_fly is an arthropod	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
boston_children_s_museum is a museum in the city boston	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
state_university is a sports team also known as san_francisco_state	1111	06-jul-2018	99.9
zsl_london_zoo is a zoo in the city central_london	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
recluse_spiders is an arthropod as well as spiders also is	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
clay_johnson is a person who belongs to the organization transition_team	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0