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
iadis_international_conference is a conference	1111	06-jul-2018	99.6
asda_stores is a retail store	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
first_official_meeting is a perception action	1111	06-jul-2018	97.8
african_capital is a geopolitical entity that is a location	1111	06-jul-2018	92.3
moms_study is a research project	1111	06-jul-2018	99.2
capital is a city also known as washington_d_c_	1113	15-aug-2018	93.8
buffalo_sabres is a sports team also known as pittsburgh_penguins	1112	24-jul-2018	100.0
sweats is a clothing item to go with shirts	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
columbia_university is a sports team that plays the sport football	1116	12-sep-2018	99.5
lima is the capital city of the country peru	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0