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
the_dick_powell_show is a TV show	1111	06-jul-2018	99.9
district_6_representative is a kind of office held by a politician	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
yellow_bellied_toad is an animal	1112	24-jul-2018	100.0
griffith_road is a street	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
kincardineshire is a county	1111	06-jul-2018	91.6
clark is an athlete who injured his/her knee	1114	25-aug-2018	100.0
missouri_state_university is a sports team also known as state_university	1111	06-jul-2018	98.4
thomas_meskill died in the city delray_beach	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
fdr is a U.S. politician who holds the office of secretary	1113	15-aug-2018	99.7
baseball is a sport with fans in the country china	1111	06-jul-2018	99.2