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
robert_mcarthur is a writer	1111	06-jul-2018	91.2
state_street_station is a train station	1111	06-jul-2018	99.6
steel_wiresection_steel is a building material	1111	06-jul-2018	96.7
fathers_father is a monarch	1111	06-jul-2018	99.1
alger_vineyards_and_winery is a winery	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
ed_koch is the leader of the city nueva_york	1116	12-sep-2018	99.6
abington_memorial is a hospital in the city philadelphia	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
kootenay_lake is a lake in the state or province british_columbia	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
bed is often found in casita	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
sydney is the capital city of the state or province nsw	1116	12-sep-2018	99.6