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
brookland_arkansas is a beach	1111	06-jul-2018	99.9
keel_bellied_water_snake is a reptile	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
terrorism_and is a socio-political term	1111	06-jul-2018	91.8
lekhitic_languages is a language	1111	06-jul-2018	99.3
school_golf is a sport	1111	06-jul-2018	91.2
gas_transit is a generalization of nuclear_missile	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
mary_mcgrory is a journalist that writes for the publication washington	1113	15-aug-2018	93.8
chhattisgarh is a sate or province located in the country india	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
columbus is the capital city of the state or province ohio	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
scott_hairston is an athlete that flied out to position center	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0