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
hodeidah is a visualizable object	1111	06-jul-2018	98.7
brief_picture is form of visual art	1111	06-jul-2018	96.9
kenneth_miller is a scientist	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
n4_different_countries is a geopolitical entity that is a location	1111	06-jul-2018	92.4
li_chen is an Asian person	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
moses and samuel are siblings	1112	24-jul-2018	93.8
john_steinbeck wrote the book the_winter_of_our_discontent	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
the sports team germany was the winner of world_cup	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
ray_lewis plays the athletic team position player	1114	25-aug-2018	96.9
r_t__rybak is the leader of the city minneapolis	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0