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
patricia_west is an Australian person	1111	06-jul-2018	94.6
marshfield_wisconsin is an island	1111	06-jul-2018	95.7
two_agreements is a TV show	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
orchid_leaves is a vegetable	1111	06-jul-2018	93.6
the_downeast_coastal_press is a political blog	1111	06-jul-2018	99.2
cnn__msnbc is a company in the economic sector of media	1112	24-jul-2018	100.0
kabul is the capital city of the country afghanistan	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
cost is an agricultural product that is usually cut into _	1114	25-aug-2018	100.0
black_pepper is an agricultural product that is usually cooked with chilli	1114	25-aug-2018	96.9
nissan makes the automobile maxima	1114	25-aug-2018	99.9