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
funchal_airport is a transportation system	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
simon_king is an African person	1111	06-jul-2018	99.2
phone_sales is an item found on a table	1111	06-jul-2018	90.7
biombo_region is a state or a province	1111	06-jul-2018	96.9
gibraltar_social_democrats is a political party	1111	06-jul-2018	96.3
cal_ripken_jr plays the athletic team position player	1115	03-sep-2018	100.0
jacksonville_jaguars participated in the event games	1112	24-jul-2018	93.8
legace and chris_osgood are teammates	1111	06-jul-2018	93.8
wigmore_hall is a tourist attraction in the city central_london	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
iconic_characters is a generalization of james_dean	1115	03-sep-2018	100.0