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
class_legal_services is a machine-learning conference	1111	06-jul-2018	98.0
infection_signs is a disease	1111	06-jul-2018	90.3
broad_river is a river	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
sale_shapes is a geometric shape	1111	06-jul-2018	92.6
n12729 is a ZIP code	1111	06-jul-2018	99.8
kevin_love and williams are teammates	1111	06-jul-2018	93.8
randy_wolf is an athlete that flied out to position center	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
memorial_sloan_kettering is a hospital in the city nueva_york	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
hanoi is the capital city of the country vietnam	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
hub_airports is a generalization of sfo	1114	25-aug-2018	100.0