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
kqed_tv is a TV station	1111	06-jul-2018	99.8
jennifer_darling is a commedian	1111	06-jul-2018	96.2
center_acceptance is a sports team position	1111	06-jul-2018	98.8
bed_smoking is a household item	1111	06-jul-2018	91.4
california_humboldt_county is a county	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
khartoum is the capital city of the country sudan	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
Eating soluble_fiber decreases the risk of heart_disease	1114	25-aug-2018	93.8
ford is a company that produces aspire	1114	25-aug-2018	100.0
cells is a subpart of the body within human_body	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
bedroom is often found in site	1116	12-sep-2018	99.8