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
n20_00_eur is a year	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
ball_gloves is sports equipment	1111	06-jul-2018	96.5
black_molds is a fungus	1111	06-jul-2018	91.5
ebony_ayes is a fashion model	1111	06-jul-2018	91.4
tarragon_butter is a condiment	1111	06-jul-2018	99.9
harvey_araton is a journalist that writes for the publication new_york_times	1112	24-jul-2018	100.0
native_english is the language of the country us	1115	03-sep-2018	96.9
kimn is a radio station in the city denver	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
yugoslav_federation is a country located in the geopolitical location greece	1111	06-jul-2018	93.8
n_djamena is a city located in the geopolitical location chad	1111	06-jul-2018	93.8