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
original_chicken is a type of meat	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
jackson_county_teachers_credit_union is a bank	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
vinyl_footballs is sports equipment	1111	06-jul-2018	93.1
patti_williams is a professor	1111	06-jul-2018	90.9
burnet_park_zoo is an aquarium	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
new_york_stock_exchange is an organization known by the acronym nyse	1113	15-aug-2018	100.0
president_obama is a U.S. politician endorsed by the U.S. politician palin	1112	24-jul-2018	99.2
the country south_africa uses the currency rand	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
pastry has color brown	1116	12-sep-2018	96.9
british_museum is a museum in the city central_london	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0