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
wood_wasp is an invertebrate	1111	06-jul-2018	98.3
internet_differing is a physical action	1111	06-jul-2018	96.6
william_yardley is a Canadian person	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
st___roch_cemetery is a place of worship	1111	06-jul-2018	99.8
hotel_alisios_bavaro is a place to ski	1111	06-jul-2018	90.9
kwgs is a radio station in the city tulsa	1116	12-sep-2018	96.9
mccormick_place is a stadium or event venue located in the city chicago_south	1116	12-sep-2018	99.8
slavic is a language used in the university indiana_university	1115	03-sep-2018	100.0
stephen_green is a person who belongs to the organization hsbc	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
fosphenytoin is a drug worked on by pfizer	1114	25-aug-2018	100.0