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
nice_sea_breeze is a weather phenomenon	1111	06-jul-2018	99.4
helena_road is a street	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
iron_cast_steel_decoration is a building material	1111	06-jul-2018	97.4
vida_music_festival_tucson is a music festival	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
kitchen_scissors is an office supply	1111	06-jul-2018	93.6
sheraton_san_diego is a hotel in the city san_diego	1116	12-sep-2018	93.8
green_tea is an agricultural product produced in china	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
npr is a company that has an office in the city los_angeles_ca	1112	24-jul-2018	93.8
hearst has acquired chronicle	1113	15-aug-2018	98.4
large_herds is a generalization of antelope	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0