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
john_mckay is an astronaut	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
baked_ham is a type of meat	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
wine_manager is a profession	1111	06-jul-2018	95.6
rob_sliver is a politician	1111	06-jul-2018	91.4
critical_middle_school_years is a non-disease physiological condition	1111	06-jul-2018	95.1
display001 looks like system	1112	24-jul-2018	98.4
alice_cooper is a musician in the genre rock	1113	15-aug-2018	96.9
air_mail is headquartered in the country usa	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
vivian_yu is a person who has residence in the geopolitical location los_angeles_ca	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
unknown is the attacker in the event aleppo_university_bombings	1114	25-aug-2018	100.0