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
church_of_god_of_the_seventh_day is a religion	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
grimsby is a transportation port	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
small_awareness is a character trait	1111	06-jul-2018	99.3
nerve_cancer is a disease	1111	06-jul-2018	90.2
irciniidae is a mollusk	1112	24-jul-2018	100.0
new_york_mets is an organization created at the date n1962	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
blockbuster_express is a company that has an office in the country mexico	1114	25-aug-2018	100.0
european_countries is a generalization of poland	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
ny is a sate or province located in the country u_s_	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
large_herds is a generalization of zebra	1111	06-jul-2018	99.8