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
physical_activity_data is a scientific term	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
skinniness is a physical characteristic	1112	24-jul-2018	100.0
democrat_sen__john_kerry is a U.S. politician	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
natural_light_photography is form of visual art	1111	06-jul-2018	99.1
hotel_bedroom_furniture is a kind of furniture	1111	06-jul-2018	99.8
logan was born in chicago_south	1116	12-sep-2018	99.2
scarlett_johansson is an actor that worked with the director woody_allen	1114	25-aug-2018	100.0
john_carpenter directed the movie halloween	1115	03-sep-2018	99.8
koce is a company that has an office in the city los_angeles_ca	1111	06-jul-2018	99.9
euston is a park in the city central_london	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0