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
shawn_everett is a North American person	1111	06-jul-2018	91.3
joey_torres is american	1111	06-jul-2018	91.4
la_quinta_inn_hampton is a hotel	1111	06-jul-2018	97.9
sinaia is a geopolitical entity that is an organization	1111	06-jul-2018	94.6
southern_giant_petrel is a bird	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
snails is an animal that eats algae	1113	15-aug-2018	100.0
kolo is a TV station in the city reno	1116	12-sep-2018	93.8
london is taller than million_people	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
jaco_pastorius is a musician who is part of weather_report	1115	03-sep-2018	96.9
japanese_language is a language taught in language schools in the city tokyo	1113	15-aug-2018	100.0