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
bay is a school	1115	03-sep-2018	100.0
jay_bernstein is a journalist	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
buffet_apricot_upsidedown_cake is a baked good	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
upscale_magazine is a company	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
pumpkin_pur_e is a visualizable thing	1111	06-jul-2018	98.2
lifetime is taller than events	1116	12-sep-2018	98.4
widow is an arthropod as well as spiders also is	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
national is a bank that bought punjab_national_bank	1114	25-aug-2018	100.0
optimizing_password_composition_policies occurrs in the building gates_and_hillman_centers	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
deer_tick is called tick	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0