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
faculty_appointments_committee is a political organization that is not part of the government	1111	06-jul-2018	91.5
william_kelley is a visual artist	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
padded_glove is sports equipment	1111	06-jul-2018	97.7
azerbaijani_turkish is an ethnic group	1111	06-jul-2018	97.1
el_arenal is a visualizable scene	1111	06-jul-2018	99.9
huntington_park is a generalization of temple_of_the_reclining_buddha	1115	03-sep-2018	100.0
franklin is a city located in the state or province massachusetts	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
cleveland_hopkins is a building located in the city cleveland	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
dioxide is a chemical that is a kind of companies	1111	06-jul-2018	93.8
reptiles is an animal that preys on animals	1112	24-jul-2018	100.0