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
nieuwegein is a visualizable scene	1111	06-jul-2018	99.4
caving_cuckoo_clock is an item found on a wall	1111	06-jul-2018	99.5
center_centre is a sports team position	1111	06-jul-2018	98.5
frank_coleman is a criminal	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
sorriness is a physical characteristic	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
woody_guthrie is a musician in the genre folk	1113	15-aug-2018	99.9
auburn_avenue is a street in the city atlanta	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
will_ohman is an athlete that flied out to position center	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
standard_life is a bank in scotland	1114	25-aug-2018	93.8
san_francisco is a city that lies on the river yosemite	1112	24-jul-2018	93.8