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
l_a__weekly is a blog	1111	06-jul-2018	98.9
comment_results is software used by machine-learning scientists	1111	06-jul-2018	99.2
arsenic_cave is a cave	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
greater_central_florida_area is a county	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
shopping_for_a_radio is an item often found in a bedroom	1111	06-jul-2018	99.8
phnom_penh is a city that lies on the river mekong_river	1112	24-jul-2018	93.8
the companies newark_star_ledger and new_york compete with eachother	1111	06-jul-2018	99.6
anne_perry contributed to the creative work a_breach_of_promise	1111	06-jul-2018	96.9
charlotte is the capital city of the country us	1116	12-sep-2018	93.8
miguel_tejada held the position of shoe_shine_boy	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0