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
iorio_arena is a stadium or event venue	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
american_football_ball is sports equipment	1111	06-jul-2018	92.9
white_eared_cotton_rat is a vertebrate	1112	24-jul-2018	100.0
wellmont_bristol_regional_medical_center is a hospital	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
american_soul is a genre of music	1111	06-jul-2018	99.3
microsoft_corporation001 is a synonym for basic	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
emperor has citizenship in the country germany	1112	24-jul-2018	100.0
holborn is a park in the city central_london	1116	12-sep-2018	99.9
edmonton is a city that lies on the river north_saskatchewan	1111	06-jul-2018	99.8
football_players is a generalization of donovan_mcnabb	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0