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
recipes_chicken_soup is a recipe	1111	06-jul-2018	99.5
hotel_bedroom_furniture is a kind of furniture	1111	06-jul-2018	99.8
bloody_x_sunday_records is a record label	1111	06-jul-2018	97.5
shanghai_medical_university is a school	1116	12-sep-2018	99.6
senate_corporations_committee is a political organization that is not part of the government	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
spiders is an animal that is a kind of recluse	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
nuclear_weapons is a type of weapon produced in russia	1113	15-aug-2018	100.0
l_a_ is a city also known as los_angeles_ca	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
tampa_international_airport is a generalization of temple_of_the_reclining_buddha	1113	15-aug-2018	100.0
tim_stauffer plays the sport baseball	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0