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
first_committee_meeting is a perception action	1111	06-jul-2018	97.7
nelson_tan is a Canadian person	1111	06-jul-2018	90.7
chocolate_box_milk_dark_asst is a kind of candy	1111	06-jul-2018	96.9
lemon_cookie is a baked good	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
living_hope_church is a religion	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
boston_herald is a newspaper in the city boston	1116	12-sep-2018	98.4
dodge is a specific automobile maker dealer in new_york	1115	03-sep-2018	100.0
downtown_marriott_hotel is a hotel in the city los_angeles_ca	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
larry_king is a company in the economic sector of news	1114	25-aug-2018	100.0
kenwood_corporation is a park in the city chicago_south	1116	12-sep-2018	96.9