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
whole_grain_flours is a fruit	1111	06-jul-2018	98.8
bench_tables is a kind of furniture	1111	06-jul-2018	99.7
professional_graphic_artist is a job position	1111	06-jul-2018	95.2
center_greener is a sports team position	1111	06-jul-2018	99.2
sainte_catherine_street is a highway	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
kjr_am is a radio station in the city seattle	1116	12-sep-2018	96.9
greg_bear contributed to the creative work darwin_s_radio	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
td_garden is a tourist attraction in the city boston	1116	12-sep-2018	93.8
cnbc is a company in the economic sector of business	1114	25-aug-2018	93.8
bed is often found in square_foot_rooms	1115	03-sep-2018	93.8