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
phone_gsm is an item found on a table	1111	06-jul-2018	91.4
sokol_blosser_winery is a winery	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
william_morse is a European person	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
n12_36_47 is a term used by physicists	1111	06-jul-2018	95.9
bourg is a city	1111	06-jul-2018	99.9
william_yardley is a journalist that writes for the publication times	1112	24-jul-2018	93.8
china is a country located in the geopolitical location consuming_countries	1111	06-jul-2018	96.9
john_mccain is a person who has age 72	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
zebrafish is a type of vertebrates	1115	03-sep-2018	100.0
washington_d_c_ is the home city of the sports team howard_university	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0