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
luis_roman is an actor	1111	06-jul-2018	91.4
international_coordinator is a kind of office held by a politician	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
southern_new_guinea_snapping_turtle is an amphibian	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
kurdistan_independence_party is a terrorist organization	1111	06-jul-2018	99.3
the_sweet_by_and_by is a book	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
blessed_virgin_mary is the mother of child	1116	12-sep-2018	93.8
david_bowie is a musician in the genre rock	1113	15-aug-2018	99.9
coronary_artery arises from aorta	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
bill_gates is a person who was written about in new_york_times	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
mike_schmidt is an athlete that flied out to position center	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0