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
jenny_mollen is a female	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
philippe_jacques_de_loutherbourg is an architect	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
voltaire is a European person	1111	06-jul-2018	93.8
bush_trees is a plant	1111	06-jul-2018	99.3
all_day_conference is a conference	1111	06-jul-2018	99.5
stan_van_gundy coaches the team magic	1116	12-sep-2018	98.4
object_storage is part of special_sdi_seminar	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
lake_ontario is a lake in the state or province new_york_state	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
john_carpenter directed the movie halloween	1115	03-sep-2018	99.8
whitney_houston is a person who died at the age of nonneginteger:n48	1116	12-sep-2018	99.9