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
royal_albert_hall is a stadium or event venue	1111	06-jul-2018	91.6
british_clock is an item found on a wall	1111	06-jul-2018	99.6
capital_city_weekly is a blog	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
n1_3_loss is an event outcome	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
cabbage_carrots is a vegetable	1111	06-jul-2018	95.3
toronto_eaton_centre is a shopping mall in the city toronto	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
engineering_degrees concerns computer	1116	12-sep-2018	98.4
baseball is a sport played in the venue camden_yards	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
john_carpenter directed the movie the_thing	1115	03-sep-2018	99.2
children is an animal that can develop hearing_loss	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0