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
jessica_elliott is a female	1111	06-jul-2018	99.9
text_critical_thinking is a cognitive action	1111	06-jul-2018	99.9
petland is a location	1112	24-jul-2018	95.3
__americans is an ethnic group	1111	06-jul-2018	93.6
giovan_paolo_lomazzo is a visual artist	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
the_daily_telegraph is a newspaper in the city central_london	1116	12-sep-2018	93.8
naval_research_laboratory is headquartered in the country u_s_	1116	12-sep-2018	96.9
ants is an animal that eats seeds	1115	03-sep-2018	100.0
president is a person who has age nonneginteger:n48	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
baltimore is the home city of the sports team towson_university	1116	12-sep-2018	99.2