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
elblag is a state or a province	1111	06-jul-2018	96.9
cynthia_cox is an actor	1111	06-jul-2018	91.1
prairie_view_restaurant is a restaurant	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
much_of_the_original_rennie_bridge is a bridge	1111	06-jul-2018	99.3
hotel_wolcott is a tourist attraction	1111	06-jul-2018	94.2
regents_park is a park in the city central_london	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
widow is an animal that is a kind of spiders	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
paw_paw_river is a lake in the state or province michigan	1116	12-sep-2018	93.8
alcoa is a company that has an office in the country iceland	1114	25-aug-2018	100.0
management is a type of business	1114	25-aug-2018	100.0