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
class_capacity is a character trait	1111	06-jul-2018	99.6
princeton_alumni_association is a professional organization	1111	06-jul-2018	90.7
sri_lankan_workers is a trade union	1111	06-jul-2018	91.7
her_home_magazine is a magazine	1111	06-jul-2018	99.8
msn_hotmail is a website	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
the country singapore uses the currency dollars	1116	12-sep-2018	99.1
kplz_fm is a radio station in the city seattle	1116	12-sep-2018	99.9
calcutta is the capital city of the state or province west_bengal	1116	12-sep-2018	98.9
blueridge is a mountain in the state or province virginia	1116	12-sep-2018	93.8
los_angeles_ca is the home city of the sports team l_a__clippers	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0