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
san_francisco is a location	1112	24-jul-2018	100.0
haldi is a visualizable thing	1111	06-jul-2018	96.1
ordinary_clock is an item often found in a bedroom	1111	06-jul-2018	99.9
james_mcdonald is american	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
n2005_meeting is a music festival	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
kennedy represents the region us	1115	03-sep-2018	99.9
space_needle is a building located in the city seattle	1116	12-sep-2018	99.6
perry_fewell coaches the team bills	1116	12-sep-2018	93.8
lice is an animal that eats blood	1111	06-jul-2018	99.6
wsee is a TV affiliate of the network cbs_evening_news	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0