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
candy_bra is a kind of candy	1111	06-jul-2018	95.9
quality_kitchen is a kind of room	1111	06-jul-2018	99.9
widespread_fungus is a fungus	1111	06-jul-2018	99.7
think_recordings is a record label	1111	06-jul-2018	97.4
american_partners_federal_credit_union is a bank	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
william_verity was born in the state or province ohio	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
john_bale plays the sport baseball	1116	12-sep-2018	99.9
dramatic_literature is an academic program at the university college	1112	24-jul-2018	96.9
hsbc is a bank in china	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
mark is a person who moved to the state utah	1115	03-sep-2018	99.9