Read the Web :: Carnegie Mellon University

NELL: Never-Ending Language Learning

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.

instance	iteration	date learned	confidence
kansas_city_kansas_street_blues_festival is a music festival	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
native_art_gallery is a museum	1111	06-jul-2018	91.0
lavender_tree is a plant	1111	06-jul-2018	99.7
oldsmobile_442_hurst_special is a kind of vehicle	1111	06-jul-2018	99.9
wvbe is a radio station	1111	06-jul-2018	96.9

jerusalem is the capital city of the country israel	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
p_j__brown is a person also known as j_p__howell	1115	03-sep-2018	100.0
victoria was born in the city birmingham	1116	12-sep-2018	96.9
n5_18 is the time of the event big_earthquake_shakes_tokyo__17_injured	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
jonglei is a state or province located in the geopolitical location sudan	1115	03-sep-2018	98.4

Read the Web
Research Project at Carnegie Mellon University

NELL: Never-Ending Language Learning

Recently-Learned Facts