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
babcock_peak is a mountain	1111	06-jul-2018	99.9
brest_car is a product	1111	06-jul-2018	90.6
mahand is a geopolitical entity that is an organization	1111	06-jul-2018	94.8
ireland_wicklow is a country	1111	06-jul-2018	98.4
n8_5_victory is an event outcome	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
european_countries is a generalization of britain	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
grand_teton is a mountain in the state or province wyoming	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
columbia empties into river willamette	1112	24-jul-2018	93.8
route is a street in the city boston	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
pat_hill is related to usa	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0