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
technical_schools_farm is a farm	1111	06-jul-2018	99.9
gasoline_blending is a refinery product	1114	25-aug-2018	94.5
poker_star_texas is a board game	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
ground_grass is a plant	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
great_veins is a vein	1111	06-jul-2018	97.2
oscar_peterson is a person born on the date n1925	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
ford has acquired mazda	1114	25-aug-2018	98.4
macao is a country also known as china	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
ollantaytambo is a city that lies on the river urubamba	1112	24-jul-2018	96.9
natalie_angier is a journalist that writes for the publication new_york_times	1111	06-jul-2018	99.2