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
dining_table_sets is a kind of furniture	1111	06-jul-2018	99.6
todd_anderson is an astronaut	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
n2_8_percent is a machine-learning algorithm	1111	06-jul-2018	99.3
saab_92x_engines is a kind of automobile engine	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
brewers is a sports team that played in n1982_world_series	1112	24-jul-2018	96.9
bridges_restaurant is a restaurant in the city vancouver	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
bucks is a sports team that plays against magic	1111	06-jul-2018	98.4
santiago_de_compostela is a city located in the country spain	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
spider_mites is an arthropod as well as pests also is	1111	06-jul-2018	99.9