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
district_of_columbia_general_hospital is a hospital	1111	06-jul-2018	95.4
lemon_pie_recipe is a recipe	1111	06-jul-2018	99.8
open_car_door is an item often found in a hallway	1111	06-jul-2018	99.7
landslide_information is a scientific term	1111	06-jul-2018	90.8
susan_ducey is a U.S. politician	1111	06-jul-2018	99.9
countries is a generalization of canada	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
route is a street in the city boston	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
wharton_school is a sports team that plays in the league international	1116	12-sep-2018	99.8
wsbt is a TV affiliate of the network cbs_evening_news	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
grundy is a city located in the state or province tennessee	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0