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
jesse_crain is an athlete	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
mississippi_college_clinton is a train station	1111	06-jul-2018	99.7
sierra_valley_district_hospital is a hospital	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
haloferax_sp__50c21_6 is an archaeon	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
castor_oil_glycidyl_ether is a chemical	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
seattle_pi is a company headquartered in the city seattle	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
state_university is a sports team also known as missouri_state_university	1111	06-jul-2018	98.4
barry_bonds plays the athletic team position player	1115	03-sep-2018	99.9
jeep makes the automobile dodge_caliber	1114	25-aug-2018	93.8
kpdx is a TV station in the city portland	1116	12-sep-2018	93.8