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
democratic_turkey_party_or_dtp is a political party	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
zoo_de_lourosa is a zoo	1111	06-jul-2018	99.9
pine_brook_covered_bridge is a bridge	1111	06-jul-2018	98.9
jane_harrison is a professor	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
wmal_tv is a TV station	1111	06-jul-2018	99.1
la_times is a newspaper in the city los_angeles_ca	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
spiders is called recluse_spider	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
julia_roberts has brother eric_roberts	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
microsoft was responsible for microsoft_confirms_office_for_apple_ipad	1115	03-sep-2018	100.0
criminals is a generalization of president_bill_clinton001	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0