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
n9_59_53 is a year	1111	06-jul-2018	92.9
arts_application is an academic field	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
arthrobacter_nasiphocae is a bacterium	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
nascar_the_game_2011 is a video game	1111	06-jul-2018	92.7
thinlegged_wolf_spiders is an arachnid	1112	24-jul-2018	100.0
china_eastern_airlines is a company headquartered in the city shanghai	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
the companies new_york and youtube compete with eachother	1111	06-jul-2018	98.4
irondequoit_bay is a lake in the state or province ontario	1116	12-sep-2018	99.9
european_nations is a generalization of ireland	1115	03-sep-2018	99.2
william_verity was born in the state or province ohio	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0