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
hawley_lake is a trail	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
sultan_ahmad_shah_bridge is a bridge	1111	06-jul-2018	98.2
poker_yalp is a non-sports, non-electronic game	1111	06-jul-2018	95.1
the_western_producer is a newspaper	1111	06-jul-2018	96.2
television_software is a tool	1111	06-jul-2018	99.8
moses and samuel are siblings	1112	24-jul-2018	93.8
terry_tempest_williams held the position of author	1114	25-aug-2018	100.0
yanks is a sports team that won the world_series	1115	03-sep-2018	100.0
whdh is headquartered in the city boston	1116	12-sep-2018	99.2
english is a language used in the university ohio_state_university	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0