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
n1985_6 is a date	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
ralph_snyder is a writer	1111	06-jul-2018	91.6
chief_staff_attorney is a kind of office held by a politician	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
jay_bernstein is a journalist	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
wonderful_picture is form of visual art	1111	06-jul-2018	96.5
dutch is the language of the country surinam	1115	03-sep-2018	93.8
students is an animal that can develop chicken_pox	1116	12-sep-2018	93.8
marcus_amphitheatre is a stadium or event venue located in the city downtown_milwaukee	1116	12-sep-2018	96.9
commission_junction_and_linkshare is an organization known by the acronym commision_junction	1114	25-aug-2018	100.0
national is a company that has an office in the country the_philippines	1114	25-aug-2018	100.0