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
adult_sunday_school_classes is a TV show	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
old_john_deer_farm is a farm	1111	06-jul-2018	99.8
rivoli_restaurant is a restaurant	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
joints is a bone	1111	06-jul-2018	91.0
beech_grove_area is a building	1111	06-jul-2018	95.7
leslie_moonves is the CEO of cbs_evening_news	1116	12-sep-2018	99.9
wrva is a radio station in the city richmond	1116	12-sep-2018	93.8
michael_ryder is an athlete that flied out to position center	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
insects is an invertebrate animal that feeds on roses	1113	15-aug-2018	93.8
the country jamaica uses the currency dollars	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0