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
rarotonga_hospital is a hospital	1111	06-jul-2018	91.5
air_recordings is a record label	1111	06-jul-2018	98.3
n2009_portland_international_film_festival is a film festival	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
letter_sized_paper is an office supply	1111	06-jul-2018	96.2
tunkhannock_creek is a river	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
snails is an animal that eats plants	1113	15-aug-2018	98.5
cells is a subpart of the body within development	1111	06-jul-2018	93.8
postal_service is an organization known by the acronym ups_express	1116	12-sep-2018	99.3
konotop is a city located in the country ukraine	1116	12-sep-2018	93.8
metropolitan_museum is a museum in the city nueva_york	1116	12-sep-2018	98.4