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
special_education_consultant is a kind of office held by a politician	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
wilbur_pond is a lake	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
greg_maddux is a Mexican person	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
janet_meyer is american	1111	06-jul-2018	91.2
maureen_dougherty is a writer	1111	06-jul-2018	91.5
biden is a U.S. politician endorsed by the U.S. politician hillary_clinton	1112	24-jul-2018	100.0
dsc_communications hired john_hendricks	1113	15-aug-2018	100.0
british_museum is a tourist attraction in the city central_london	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
steve001 is an athlete who injured his/her eyes	1112	24-jul-2018	100.0
cavaliers is a sports team that plays against raptors	1111	06-jul-2018	99.9