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
n12859 is a ZIP code	1111	06-jul-2018	99.8
black_hynobiid_salamander is an amphibian	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
orange_county_zoo is an aquarium	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
storms_snow is a weather phenomenon	1111	06-jul-2018	99.0
george_englund is a male	1111	06-jul-2018	95.2
dc is a city also known as boston	1113	15-aug-2018	93.8
austria is a generalization of eastern_european_countries	1115	03-sep-2018	100.0
bed is often found in accessible_room	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
national is a bank that bought standard_bank	1114	25-aug-2018	100.0
morgan_freeman starred in the movie the_shawshank_redemption	1115	03-sep-2018	98.4