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
piawi_languages is a language	1111	06-jul-2018	98.7
environmental_partnership_foundation is a professional organization	1111	06-jul-2018	91.5
access_table is a kind of furniture	1111	06-jul-2018	99.5
nappiness is a physical characteristic	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
shuswap_lake is a lake	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
white_t_shirts is a clothing item to go with pants	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
raptors is a sports team that plays against sixers	1111	06-jul-2018	99.6
larger_animals is an animal that is a kind of humans	1112	24-jul-2018	93.8
lucca_restaurant is a restaurant in the city los_angeles_ca	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
the country sri_lanka uses the currency rupees	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0