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
utrecht_university is a university	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
new_hope_bible_church is a religion	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
terrorist_activity_financing_offence ia a crime or charge	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
long_nose_hawkfish is a fish	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
inferior_posterior_nasal_bdddeeranches is a nerve	1111	06-jul-2018	99.1
countrywide is a bank that has angelo_r__mozilo as its CEO	1116	12-sep-2018	93.8
baseball is a sport played in the venue yankee_stadium	1115	03-sep-2018	100.0
shea is the home venue for the sports team n4_2_mets	1116	12-sep-2018	93.8
london_heathrow_airport is a generalization of temple_of_the_reclining_buddha	1114	25-aug-2018	100.0
canal is a subpart of the body within nerve_roots	1111	06-jul-2018	96.9