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
miscellaneous_magazines is a kind of media	1111	06-jul-2018	99.1
birch_island_maine is a beach	1111	06-jul-2018	92.7
annual_gathering is a music festival	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
ettione_stuckey is a commedian	1111	06-jul-2018	90.5
south_lake_tahoe_airport is an airport	1111	06-jul-2018	95.6
equipment is a kind of equipment for the sport team	1115	03-sep-2018	100.0
social_room_328 is a room in the building mellon_institute	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
barack_obama represents the region harvard_law_review	1114	25-aug-2018	100.0
plain_dealer is a newspaper in the city cleveland	1116	12-sep-2018	96.9
bangkok is a city also known as krung_thep	1112	24-jul-2018	93.8