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
beautiful_shiner is a fish	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
image_colors is a color	1111	06-jul-2018	99.9
inner_square is a geometric shape	1111	06-jul-2018	93.5
hung_to_seafood_restaurant is a restaurant	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
sauvignon_blanc_and_semillon is a beverage	1111	06-jul-2018	99.9
yugoslav_federation is a country located in the geopolitical location iraq	1111	06-jul-2018	96.9
sun is a newspaper in the city new_york	1116	12-sep-2018	92.9
alex_chilton is a musician who is part of big_star	1115	03-sep-2018	93.8
n18_people participated in the event result	1111	06-jul-2018	98.4
cricket is a sport taught in the country india	1115	03-sep-2018	100.0