Read the Web :: Carnegie Mellon University

NELL: Never-Ending Language Learning

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.

instance	iteration	date learned	confidence
texas_dow_employees_credit_union is a bank	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
judicial_office is a kind of room	1111	06-jul-2018	99.6
n2007_chevrolet_uplander is a model of automobile	1111	06-jul-2018	94.7
legislative_committees is a political organization that is not part of the government	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
brian_connolly is a commedian	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0

usps is a company also known as united_states_postal_service	1111	06-jul-2018	93.8
snails is an animal that eats plants	1113	15-aug-2018	98.5
english_language is a language taught in language schools in the city san_francisco	1112	24-jul-2018	92.9
newsday is a newspaper in the city new_york	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
mike is a person who moved to the state utah	1115	03-sep-2018	93.8

Read the Web
Research Project at Carnegie Mellon University

NELL: Never-Ending Language Learning

Recently-Learned Facts