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
three_lined_kukri_snake is a reptile	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
chen_binghong is an Asian person	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
americanese is an ethnic group	1111	06-jul-2018	94.6
easter_egg_hunting is a hobby	1111	06-jul-2018	95.7
light_development is a perception event	1111	06-jul-2018	93.0
san_antonio is a city located in the geopolitical location texas	1112	24-jul-2018	100.0
capitol is headquartered in the city seattle	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
english is the language of the country gambia	1114	25-aug-2018	99.2
george_will is a journalist that writes for the publication washington	1113	15-aug-2018	93.8
birmingham is a city located in the country great_britain	1116	12-sep-2018	93.8