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
right_dorsal_aorta is an artery	1111	06-jul-2018	99.7
wmal_tv is a TV station	1111	06-jul-2018	99.1
brian_howard is a scientist	1111	06-jul-2018	99.9
email_success is an event outcome	1111	06-jul-2018	93.7
john_m__eckert is an African person	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
washington_dulles is an airport in the city washington_d_c_	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
the companies new_york and herald compete with eachother	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
institutional_review_board is an organization known by the acronym irb	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
president_obama is a U.S. politician who is a member of the political group senate	1112	24-jul-2018	99.2
german_civilians participated in the event result	1111	06-jul-2018	96.9