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
telharmonium is a musical instrument	1111	06-jul-2018	96.0
seventh_room is a kind of room	1111	06-jul-2018	99.0
widnes is a city	1111	06-jul-2018	99.8
girolamo_mazzola_bedoli is an architect	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
blueband_hermit_crab is a crustacean	1111	06-jul-2018	99.8
fred_goodwin works for scotland	1112	24-jul-2018	96.9
national is a bank in malta	1114	25-aug-2018	100.0
kingston is the capital city of the country jamaica	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
jacksonville_jaguars hired mike_mularkey	1112	24-jul-2018	93.8
chevrolet is a company that produces corvette	1114	25-aug-2018	100.0