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
arkansas_chronicle is a political blog	1111	06-jul-2018	98.8
one_large_table is a household item	1111	06-jul-2018	93.0
comment_am is software used by machine-learning scientists	1111	06-jul-2018	99.6
zoo_hannover is a zoo	1111	06-jul-2018	99.9
summer_in_the_city is a musical album	1111	06-jul-2018	99.9
royal_canadian_air_force is an organization known by the acronym rcaf	1112	24-jul-2018	93.8
city_suites is a hotel in the city chicago_south	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
china is a country located in the geopolitical location world_countries	1111	06-jul-2018	99.8
beer is an agricultural product produced in us	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
kirby_puckett plays for the team twins	1116	12-sep-2018	99.6