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
thioalkalimicrobium_microaerophilum is a bacterium	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
n20_00_eur is a year	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
committee_director is a profession	1111	06-jul-2018	96.2
deluxe_gift_basket is sports equipment	1111	06-jul-2018	92.1
agonist_muscles is a muscle	1111	06-jul-2018	99.9
temptations is a musician in the genre soul	1114	25-aug-2018	93.8
manresa_beach is a lake in the state or province california	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
james_madison is a politician who holds the office of secretary	1115	03-sep-2018	99.9
tarantulas is a synonym for spiders	1111	06-jul-2018	93.8
the home stadium of chris_chelios is wrigley_field	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0