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
livan_hernandez is an athlete	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
jason_bittner is a musician	1111	06-jul-2018	99.9
spencer_wallace is american	1111	06-jul-2018	91.5
yellow_spotted_newt is an amphibian	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
hotel_savona is a hotel	1111	06-jul-2018	98.5
chicken is an animal that eats goat_cheese	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
michael_o_connor plays the sport baseball	1116	12-sep-2018	93.8
quentin_tarantino directed the movie inglourious_basterds	1115	03-sep-2018	96.9
crickets is an arthropod that feeds on insects	1114	25-aug-2018	100.0
emile_lahoud belongs to the religion christian	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0