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
mirror_top is a household item	1111	06-jul-2018	95.8
county_counselor is a job position	1111	06-jul-2018	94.7
saturday_morning_meetings is a TV show	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
normal_nickel is a visualizable attribute	1111	06-jul-2018	90.7
corticectomy_costectomy is a medical procedure	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
system_operator is a subpart of water	1111	06-jul-2018	98.4
dan is a person who has attended the school college	1112	24-jul-2018	100.0
sega is related to pc_engine	1114	25-aug-2018	93.8
national_academy_museum is a museum in the city new_york	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
halifax is the capital city of the state or province nova_scotia	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0