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
texas_christian_university is a school	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
small_circles is a geometric shape	1111	06-jul-2018	97.2
lake_langano is a lake	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
n1999_school_election is an election	1111	06-jul-2018	95.3
sheep_tick is an invertebrate	1111	06-jul-2018	90.6
gynecology is an academic program at the university college	1113	15-aug-2018	100.0
indiana hired crean	1112	24-jul-2018	100.0
national is a company that has an office in the country malta	1114	25-aug-2018	100.0
surf is a sport taught in the country _uk	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
eric_e__schmidt is a person who was written about in new_york_times	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0