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
eastern_athletic_league is a sports league	1116	12-sep-2018	99.4
sikinos is a visualizable scene	1111	06-jul-2018	99.5
osorno_volcano is a mountain range	1111	06-jul-2018	99.9
youth_organizer is a job position	1111	06-jul-2018	95.0
private_office_area is a kind of room	1111	06-jul-2018	99.3
duck is an animal that eats goat_cheese	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
ucla was the looser of n2006_ncaa_basketball_championship	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
john_marshall represents the region states	1113	15-aug-2018	100.0
the home stadium of dustin_byfuglien is wrigley_field	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
hank_williams is a person who died on the date n1953	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0