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
illinois_state_university is a university	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
us_74 is a highway	1111	06-jul-2018	92.6
peros_banhos is a state or a province	1111	06-jul-2018	96.9
economic_magazines is a kind of media	1111	06-jul-2018	99.0
collins_lake is a lake	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
felipe_alou is the father of moises_alou	1115	03-sep-2018	93.8
john_mcenroe is an athlete who wins wimbledon	1115	03-sep-2018	98.4
the home stadium of sean_gallagher is wrigley_field	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
samuel and robert are siblings	1112	24-jul-2018	93.8
shanghai is a city that lies on the river huangpu	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0