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
ireland_chamber is a non-profit organization	1111	06-jul-2018	95.2
legalon is a drug	1111	06-jul-2018	92.0
shandin_hills is a mountain range	1111	06-jul-2018	99.9
contact_the_photographer is a visualizable object	1111	06-jul-2018	98.7
basement_laundry_room is a kind of room	1111	06-jul-2018	99.7
mci_center is a tourist attraction in the city washington_d_c_	1116	12-sep-2018	92.3
people is a company that has an office in the country china	1111	06-jul-2018	99.2
jared_cotter is a person who has age nonneginteger:n25	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
kathmandu is a city that lies on the river trishuli	1111	06-jul-2018	93.8
abraham and hagar are family members	1112	24-jul-2018	93.8