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
mohen_naorem is a U.S. politician	1111	06-jul-2018	91.2
cleeves_cove_cave is a cave	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
brian_howard is a scientist	1111	06-jul-2018	99.9
exmouth_area is a building	1111	06-jul-2018	92.4
olive_fruit is an agricultural product	1111	06-jul-2018	98.9
oscar_wilde wrote the book the_picture_of_dorian_gray	1113	15-aug-2018	100.0
ottawa is the capital city of the country canada	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
marc_anthony has wife jennifer_lopez	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
habitat_for_humanity terminated the employment of millard_fuller	1113	15-aug-2018	100.0
white is a person who has age 7	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0