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
duke_university is a school	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
undisciplinedness is an emotion	1111	06-jul-2018	97.7
malmstrom_afb_museum_and_air_park is a monument	1111	06-jul-2018	99.9
rural_magazines is a kind of media	1111	06-jul-2018	99.1
john_d__villasenor is a politician	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
blue_note hired alfred_lion	1112	24-jul-2018	100.0
bed is often found in private_living_room	1111	06-jul-2018	96.9
grande_ronde empties into river snake_river	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
the_national is a company that has an office in the country china	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
courier_journal is a newspaper in the city louisville	1116	12-sep-2018	93.8