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
shabda_raaj is a professor	1111	06-jul-2018	91.3
__________a___li___li__a_href___a__daughterless is an emotion	1111	06-jul-2018	99.1
solid_american is an ethnic group	1111	06-jul-2018	95.9
money_magazine is a blog	1111	06-jul-2018	99.9
n46_2__ is a machine-learning algorithm	1111	06-jul-2018	90.1
edgar_rice_burroughs was born in chicago_south	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
display looks like unit	1112	24-jul-2018	98.4
tv_actors is a generalization of lisa_kudrow	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
fred_taylor plays the athletic team position running_back	1113	15-aug-2018	100.0
samuel and robert are siblings	1112	24-jul-2018	93.8