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
pygmy_mouse is a vertebrate	1112	24-jul-2018	100.0
karen_thatcher is a commedian	1111	06-jul-2018	90.8
amy_myers is a person	1111	06-jul-2018	94.1
may_17_election is an election	1111	06-jul-2018	95.7
nitroplanes_com is a retail store	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
oscar is a person who graduated from the university college	1111	06-jul-2018	99.6
murray_chass is a journalist that writes for the publication new_york_times	1112	24-jul-2018	100.0
kipling001 was born in bombay	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
wharton_school is a sports team that plays in the league international	1116	12-sep-2018	99.8
lebanon is the capital city of the country lebanon	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0