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
banana_wheat_germ_bread is a baked good	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
texas_southmost_college is a university	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
john_sutcliffe is a criminal	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
librarianship is an academic field	1111	06-jul-2018	91.0
liberal_activist is a profession	1111	06-jul-2018	96.2
magic is a sports team that played in playoffs	1111	06-jul-2018	99.2
spain is a country located in the geopolitical location foreign_countries	1112	24-jul-2018	100.0
hartford_connecticut is the capital city of the state or province connecticut	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
virginia_tech is a sports team that plays against usc	1111	06-jul-2018	98.4
contact_the_division is a synonym for services	1111	06-jul-2018	98.4