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
the_family_handyman_magazine is a newspaper	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
movie_secondhand_lions is a movie	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
frenchtown_montana is an island	1111	06-jul-2018	96.6
standardized_instruments is a musical instrument	1111	06-jul-2018	95.3
car_table is a kind of furniture	1111	06-jul-2018	99.7
museum_of_neon_art is a museum in the city los_angeles_ca	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
the country us uses the currency dollars	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
cdg is an airport in the city paris	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
marylebone is a tourist attraction in the city central_london	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
college_street is a street in the city macon	1116	12-sep-2018	98.4