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
ice_glass is an item found in the kitchen	1111	06-jul-2018	99.3
native_art_gallery is a museum	1111	06-jul-2018	91.0
wyav is a radio station	1111	06-jul-2018	96.9
wilbur_street is a street	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
jelly_beans__strawberry_cheesecake is a kind of candy	1111	06-jul-2018	98.2
abubakar_abdurajak_janjalani belongs to the religion muslim	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
russia_federation is an organization dissolved at the date september	1113	15-aug-2018	100.0
west_bay_street is a street in the city savannah	1116	12-sep-2018	93.8
ospel belongs to the ethnic group swiss	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
finding_needles_in_exponential_haystacks is part of math_colloquium	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0