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
expense_clock is an item often found in a bedroom	1111	06-jul-2018	99.9
assembly_meeting is a music festival	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
consumer_health_organization is an organization	1113	15-aug-2018	99.3
osorno_volcano is a mountain range	1111	06-jul-2018	99.9
summer_olympics_games is an instance of the olympics	1111	06-jul-2018	99.9
large_herds is a generalization of buffalo	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
skiing is a sport taught in the country __america	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
nancy001 graduated from college	1112	24-jul-2018	100.0
muktinath is a place of worship that practices the religion of hinduism	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
treasure_island is a tourist attraction in the city las_vegas	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0