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
breakfast_biscuits is a baked good	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
bomb_fragments is a weapon	1111	06-jul-2018	97.4
green_road is a street	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
mount_batanta is a mountain	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
brent_briscoe is a male	1111	06-jul-2018	90.7
punjabi is the language of the country india	1115	03-sep-2018	93.8
ollantaytambo is a city that lies on the river urubamba	1112	24-jul-2018	96.9
eve is the parent of garden_of_eden	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
bill_purcell is a person who has residence in the geopolitical location nashville	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
states is a state or province located in the geopolitical location visa	1112	24-jul-2018	100.0