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
side_entry_door is an item often found in a hallway	1111	06-jul-2018	99.9
low_fat_banana_muffins is a baked good	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
nobel_museum is a museum	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
sunoco_gasoline is a refinery product	1113	15-aug-2018	98.1
gats_agreement is a TV show	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
john_kerry belongs to the religion catholic	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
herds refers to more than one grazers	1116	12-sep-2018	93.8
oscar is a person who has attended the school college	1111	06-jul-2018	99.2
dc is a city that lies on the river potomac	1113	15-aug-2018	100.0
united_states_department is an organization also known as service	1112	24-jul-2018	100.0