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
way_nirvana is a musical artist	1111	06-jul-2018	97.7
brandeis_university is a school	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
north_florida is a state or a province	1111	06-jul-2018	96.9
entrusting is a physical action	1112	24-jul-2018	90.5
arachnids is an animal	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
canadian_islamic_congress is an organization known by the acronym cjc	1114	25-aug-2018	100.0
qinghai is a sate or province located in the country china	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
nigeria is a country also known as china	1111	06-jul-2018	93.8
tony_romo is an athlete who led oklahoma_state	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
tampa_bay_devil_rays is a subpart of mlb	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0