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
cyberspace_law is an academic field	1111	06-jul-2018	91.1
encouragement_award is a film festival	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
cleveland_metropark_zoo is a zoo	1111	06-jul-2018	99.9
steering_committee_meeting is a perception action	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
valuable_grain is a grain	1111	06-jul-2018	92.7
berlin_berlin is the capital city of the country germany	1116	12-sep-2018	98.4
moskovskii_komsomolets is a newspaper in the city moscow	1116	12-sep-2018	96.9
east_ham_baptist_church is a place of worship that practices the religion of baptist	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
seattle_tacoma is a generalization of temple_of_the_reclining_buddha	1114	25-aug-2018	100.0
willie_parker and ben_roethlisberger are teammates	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0