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
arteries_median is an artery	1111	06-jul-2018	99.5
billie_holiday is a musician	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
vineshire_road is a street	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
two_overlapping_circles is a geometric shape	1111	06-jul-2018	93.7
sabine_ehrenfeld is a Canadian person	1111	06-jul-2018	91.2
states is a state or province located in the geopolitical location china	1111	06-jul-2018	98.4
insects is a type of spider_mites	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
dutch is the language of the country belgium	1114	25-aug-2018	99.8
john_steinbeck wrote the book the_red_pony	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
finland is a city located in the country norway	1116	12-sep-2018	93.8