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
babbs_supermarket is a retail store	1111	06-jul-2018	99.4
yankee_candle is a personal care product	1111	06-jul-2018	99.4
wyoming_dinosaur_center is a museum	1111	06-jul-2018	92.5
contact_the_release is a book	1111	06-jul-2018	90.7
alghero_fertilia_airport is a transportation system	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
commonwealth_countries is a generalization of canada	1116	12-sep-2018	93.8
state_university is a sports team also known as ohio_northern	1111	06-jul-2018	99.6
u_s is a bank that bought union_bank	1114	25-aug-2018	100.0
beer is an agricultural product produced in china	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
irving_azoff is the CEO of giant	1116	12-sep-2018	96.9