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
first_official_meeting is a perception action	1111	06-jul-2018	97.8
kids_rooms is a kind of room	1111	06-jul-2018	99.7
david_mcgregor is an astronaut	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
n18_21 is a term used by physicists	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
exploratory_work is a research project	1111	06-jul-2018	98.1
hillary has husband president_bill_clinton001	1116	12-sep-2018	96.9
accra is the capital city of the country ghana	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
david_climer works for tennessean	1111	06-jul-2018	93.8
marlins is a sports team that won the nl_east	1114	25-aug-2018	93.8
james has wife anne	1116	12-sep-2018	99.2