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
place_shapes is a geometric shape	1111	06-jul-2018	91.2
redhumped_caterpillar is an invertebrate	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
mezas_restaurant is a restaurant	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
movie_failure_to_launch is a movie	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
same_target is a retail store	1111	06-jul-2018	99.6
boston is the home city of the sports team boston_celtics	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
anne_applebaum is a person who was written about in wall_street_journal	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
hwy is a street in the city santa_cruz	1116	12-sep-2018	99.6
president_obama is a U.S. politician who holds the office of president	1112	24-jul-2018	99.9
red_tank_top is a clothing item to go with shorts	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0