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
gazette_enterprise is a political blog	1111	06-jul-2018	99.7
redpath_museum is a museum	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
a_man_on_the_moon is a book	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
southern_free_tailed_bat is a mammal	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
mexican_blond_tarantula is an arachnid	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
microsoft_office_user_specialist is a synonym for microsoft_corporation001	1111	06-jul-2018	93.8
eve is the mother of abel	1116	12-sep-2018	99.9
european_countries is a generalization of austria	1116	12-sep-2018	96.7
indiana terminated the employment of hoeppner	1112	24-jul-2018	100.0
the coach a_j__burnett won the trophy or tournament world_series	1115	03-sep-2018	100.0