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
north_american_man_boy_love_association is a non-profit organization	1111	06-jul-2018	99.9
history_the_federal_government is an academic field	1111	06-jul-2018	98.5
n20_40 is a term used by physicists	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
part_time_waiter is a job position	1111	06-jul-2018	95.0
acura_vehicles is a kind of vehicle	1111	06-jul-2018	99.5
via_christi is a hospital in the city wichita	1116	12-sep-2018	93.8
national is a bank in switzerland_switzerland	1114	25-aug-2018	100.0
eggs is an agricultural product coming from tortoise	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
philadelphia is a city that lies on the river grand	1113	15-aug-2018	99.6
kake_tv is a TV affiliate of the network abc_news	1116	12-sep-2018	99.2