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
n30_sec_ is a visualizable object	1111	06-jul-2018	99.7
mayor_william_donald_schaefer is a politician	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
n2_8_percent is a machine-learning algorithm	1111	06-jul-2018	99.3
bobst_hospital is a hospital	1111	06-jul-2018	92.3
n2_778 is a programming language	1111	06-jul-2018	97.2
jaguars is a sports team that plays the sport football	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
sacramento is the capital city of the state or province california	1116	12-sep-2018	99.6
charles held the position of king	1115	03-sep-2018	100.0
animals is an animal that is a kind of spiders	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
william_h__macy starred in the movie fargo	1116	12-sep-2018	96.9