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
individual_plant is a plant	1111	06-jul-2018	99.3
water_conserving_toilet is an item often found in a bathroom	1111	06-jul-2018	99.9
smart_phone_manufacturers is a household item	1111	06-jul-2018	95.5
john_d__villasenor is a politician	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
channel_islands_national_park is a tourist attraction	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
victoria is the capital city of the state or province bc	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
european_nations is a generalization of austria	1115	03-sep-2018	99.6
ken_griffey plays for the team reds	1116	12-sep-2018	98.4
dc is a city also known as texas	1113	15-aug-2018	93.8
moses is the father of abram	1116	12-sep-2018	93.8