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
education_financing is a political issue	1111	06-jul-2018	99.9
poker_europa is a cardgame	1111	06-jul-2018	90.3
turkmans is an ethnic group	1111	06-jul-2018	94.1
primary_auditory_area is a kind of brain tissue	1111	06-jul-2018	99.0
us_naval_hospital is a hospital	1111	06-jul-2018	91.8
masi_oka belongs to the ethnic group japanese_american	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
peoples_republic is a country also known as china	1111	06-jul-2018	98.4
pamela_ahearn died in the state or province va	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
kdvs is a radio station in the city davis	1116	12-sep-2018	93.8
usc is a sports team that plays against virginia_tech	1111	06-jul-2018	98.4