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
president_the_last_time is a profession	1111	06-jul-2018	90.0
n1914 is a date	1112	24-jul-2018	95.4
turquoise_fronted_parrot is a bird	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
pm_students is a victim	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
associate_chairman is a kind of office held by a politician	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
richard_pryor001 is a person who died at the age of 65	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
matthew_l__wald works for times	1111	06-jul-2018	96.9
ivan_lendl is an athlete who beat john_mcenroe	1115	03-sep-2018	100.0
washington_d_c_ is the home city of the sports team howard_university	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
eve is the mother of yahweh	1114	25-aug-2018	99.2