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
classic_furniture is a kind of furniture	1111	06-jul-2018	99.7
presbyterians_today_magazine is a magazine	1111	06-jul-2018	99.8
tiny_impact is an event outcome	1111	06-jul-2018	92.9
nbc_news is a TV network	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
trinidad_mahogany_brown_tarantula is an arachnid	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
san_francisco is the home city of the sports team san_francisco_state	1116	12-sep-2018	99.2
moyer is a person who has age nonneginteger:n46	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
baseball_players is a generalization of carlos_santana	1116	12-sep-2018	98.4
national is a bank in ireland	1114	25-aug-2018	100.0
federal_national_mortgage_association is an organization known by the acronym fannie_mae	1111	06-jul-2018	98.4