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
emerald_isle_north_carolina is an island	1111	06-jul-2018	96.1
burjuman_centre_office_tower_148_0_m is a skyscraper	1111	06-jul-2018	99.9
massive_snow_storm is a weather phenomenon	1111	06-jul-2018	99.2
big_bend_canyon_lizard is a reptile	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
chevron_corp_ is a pertroleum company	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
state_university is a sports team also known as fresno_state	1112	24-jul-2018	100.0
green_park is a park in the city central_london	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
greg_bear wrote the book darwin_s_radio	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
british_air is a company also known as bbc	1114	25-aug-2018	100.0
roy_scheider belongs to the ethnic group american	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0