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
computational_mechanics is an academic field	1111	06-jul-2018	91.3
tour_de_l__abitibi is a sports race	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
asia is a continent	1114	25-aug-2018	100.0
bank_of_san_francisco is a credit union	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
two_fast_food is a parlour game	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
science is a type of management	1114	25-aug-2018	99.2
colin_hay is a musician who is part of men_at_work	1111	06-jul-2018	96.9
hsbc is a company that has an office in the country hong_kong	1114	25-aug-2018	96.9
sao_paulo is the location of the event brazilians_protest_world_cup_spending__call_for_better_services	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
national is a bank in romania	1114	25-aug-2018	100.0