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
islamic_guerrillas is a terrorist organization	1111	06-jul-2018	99.3
political_courage is a character trait	1111	06-jul-2018	99.7
william_morse is a European person	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
john_steinbeck is a scientist	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
rutgers_magazine is a magazine	1111	06-jul-2018	99.9
father is the parent of lord	1115	03-sep-2018	100.0
nuclear_warheads is a type of weapon produced in russia	1113	15-aug-2018	99.8
perennials is an agricultural product grown in region	1116	12-sep-2018	99.8
juan_abreu plays the sport baseball	1116	12-sep-2018	99.8
baseball_players is a generalization of pedro_martinez	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0