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
homeland_security_chief is a kind of office held by a politician	1111	06-jul-2018	94.7
capital_bancorp_inc is a biotech company	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
st___petersburg_russia is a visualizable scene	1111	06-jul-2018	99.1
poker_tourn_ament is a sports game	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
soul_the_soul is a genre of music	1111	06-jul-2018	99.5
jimmy_carter is a person who was written about in the_economist	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
english is the language of the country zambia	1114	25-aug-2018	97.2
kmuw is a radio station in the city wichita	1116	12-sep-2018	96.9
cascade_locks is a city that lies on the river columbia	1111	06-jul-2018	98.7
cornell graduated from college	1114	25-aug-2018	99.6