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
isa_conferences is a conference	1111	06-jul-2018	99.4
willis_brown is a male	1111	06-jul-2018	91.2
downtown_san_francisco is a visualizable scene	1111	06-jul-2018	99.7
illinois_institute_of_technology is a school	1114	25-aug-2018	100.0
the_merchants_and_farmers_bank_of_salisbury is a bank	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
uppsala_university is a sports team that plays in the league international	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
national is a bank that bought dena_bank	1114	25-aug-2018	100.0
hot_water is often found in private_bathroom	1111	06-jul-2018	93.8
don_burke works for newark_star_ledger	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
martinez is a person who graduated from the university state_university	1111	06-jul-2018	98.4