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
plaster_creek is a lake	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
santa_ana_city is a building	1111	06-jul-2018	92.0
victor_software is a tool	1111	06-jul-2018	99.3
meryan is a place to ski	1111	06-jul-2018	90.7
antique_wood_clock is an item found on a wall	1111	06-jul-2018	99.6
bernie_mac is a person who died at the age of 50	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
jake_tapper works for abc_news	1111	06-jul-2018	99.8
lucy has husband peter	1116	12-sep-2018	93.8
invesco_field_at_mile_high is the home venue for the sports team denver_broncos	1116	12-sep-2018	99.8
ramon_santiago held the position of infielder	1115	03-sep-2018	100.0