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
cooking_utensils is an item found in the kitchen	1111	06-jul-2018	99.7
unexpected_data_loss is an event outcome	1111	06-jul-2018	99.9
seventh_city is a county	1111	06-jul-2018	99.9
india_abroad is a newspaper	1111	06-jul-2018	93.1
haloferax_sp__fc28_8 is an archaeon	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
anthrax is a musician in the genre metal	1113	15-aug-2018	100.0
national is a bank in iran	1114	25-aug-2018	100.0
brasstown_bald is a mountain in the state or province georgia	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
city_suites is a hotel in the city chicago_south	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
vince_lombardi coaches the team former_green_bay_packers	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0