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
bagnolet is a visualizable scene	1111	06-jul-2018	99.5
william_peters is a European person	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
southend_road is a street	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
smithsonian_magazine is a newspaper	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
deltaform_mountain is a mountain	1111	06-jul-2018	99.9
blackberry is a product that is a kind of smartphones	1113	15-aug-2018	100.0
n8_00_pm is the time of the event suicide_blast_near_imambargah_kills_nine__injures_50_in_peshawar	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
nuclear_weapons is a type of weapon produced in russia	1113	15-aug-2018	100.0
marcus_amphitheatre is a stadium or event venue located in the city downtown_milwaukee	1116	12-sep-2018	96.9
crustaceans is a type of prawns	1113	15-aug-2018	100.0