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
manhattan_creek is a river	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
entrance_town_centre is a skyscraper	1111	06-jul-2018	99.9
change_monitoring is a physical action	1112	24-jul-2018	97.0
erik_skjoldbj_rg is a North American person	1111	06-jul-2018	91.4
candy_recipes is a kind of candy	1111	06-jul-2018	98.5
tom_bradley is a person who has residence in the state or province illinois	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
washington_d_c_ is a city also known as albany	1113	15-aug-2018	93.8
greg_bear contributed to the creative work darwin_s_radio	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
charles_brewer is an athlete who injured his/her shoulder	1114	25-aug-2018	99.2
new_york is the home city of the sports team french_culinary_institute	1116	12-sep-2018	99.8