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
hope_mason is an African person	1111	06-jul-2018	90.9
esc_2445_san_francisco_san_miguel is a South American person	1111	06-jul-2018	91.8
genuine_record is a political blog	1111	06-jul-2018	99.2
southern_tessellated_darter is a fish	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
tyne_hotels is a park	1111	06-jul-2018	90.5
engineering is an academic program at the university georgia_tech	1112	24-jul-2018	96.9
john_carpenter directed the movie the_thing	1115	03-sep-2018	99.2
kidney is a subpart of the body within tract001	1111	06-jul-2018	93.8
n160 is the number of people injured in the event aleppo_university_bombings	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
north_palisade is a mountain in the state or province california	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0