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
kota_kinabalu_international_airport is a transportation port	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
clove_leaves is a vegetable	1111	06-jul-2018	94.7
omloop_van_de_vlaamse_scheldeboorden_belgique is a sports race	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
landing_parkway is a highway	1111	06-jul-2018	93.7
cundys_harbor_maine is a beach	1111	06-jul-2018	90.7
bush is a person who was written about in denver_post	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
andrew_luck is an athlete that played for the team of school stanford	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
states is a state or province located in the geopolitical location nueva_york	1114	25-aug-2018	100.0
the sports team reds was the winner of n1940_world_series	1116	12-sep-2018	98.4
usc hired steve_spurrier	1113	15-aug-2018	93.8