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
greenish_black_mold is a fungus	1112	24-jul-2018	92.3
country_india_state_karnataka_this_article is a legislative bill	1111	06-jul-2018	93.1
aid_expenses is a machine-learning conference	1111	06-jul-2018	95.2
united_states_postal_service is a retail store	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
boonville is a city	1111	06-jul-2018	99.8
william_r__forstchen wrote the book one_second_after	1112	24-jul-2018	98.4
spiders is a type of arthropods	1111	06-jul-2018	99.1
steve_schalchlin belongs to the religion baptist	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
edward_johnson represents the region states	1114	25-aug-2018	100.0
nissan is a specific automobile maker dealer in tyler	1114	25-aug-2018	100.0