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
roosevelt_election is an election	1111	06-jul-2018	93.7
vandys_pond is a lake	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
n12_cities_and_boroughs is a state or a province	1111	06-jul-2018	96.9
ken_keltner is a male	1111	06-jul-2018	90.6
san_germ__n_municipio is a county	1111	06-jul-2018	99.9
john_mccain is a person who has age nonneginteger:n72	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
insects is called spiders	1111	06-jul-2018	93.8
camden is a park in the city central_london	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
beds is often found in big_rooms	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
chevrolet is a company that produces impala	1114	25-aug-2018	100.0