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
fairfield_county is an airport	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
scott_cohen_savoie_cheese is a cheese	1111	06-jul-2018	93.1
american_expeditionary_force is a political organization that is not part of the government	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
arts_entertainment is a political issue	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
bush_trees is a plant	1111	06-jul-2018	99.3
vancouver_general_hospital is a hospital in the city vancouver	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
spanish_language is a language taught in language schools in the city valencia	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
kohala is a mountain in the state or province hawaii	1116	12-sep-2018	99.9
former_soviet_union is a country also known as china	1111	06-jul-2018	93.8
tony_fernandez held the position of shortstop	1113	15-aug-2018	100.0