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
sheri_abrams is a CEO	1111	06-jul-2018	91.2
icpl is a conference	1111	06-jul-2018	98.7
ale_yeasts is a fungus	1112	24-jul-2018	93.2
city_county_credit_union_st_paul_mn is a credit union	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
alfredo is a monarch	1111	06-jul-2018	99.2
cells is a subpart of the body within adult_bone_marrow	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
non_hub_airports is a generalization of washington_national__dca_	1114	25-aug-2018	100.0
mcpherson001 was born in washington___d___c__	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
spiders is an arthropod as well as beetles also is	1111	06-jul-2018	99.8
ants is an animal that eats seeds	1115	03-sep-2018	100.0