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
isabelle_huppert is a North American person	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
n350_babies is an animal	1111	06-jul-2018	92.3
your_choice_of_radio is an item often found in a bedroom	1111	06-jul-2018	99.8
cloud_recordings is a record label	1111	06-jul-2018	98.5
county_board_chairman is a kind of office held by a politician	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
olympia is the capital city of the state or province washington	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
democratic is a person who has residence in the geopolitical location new_york	1114	25-aug-2018	93.8
cole_hamels is an athlete that flied out to position center	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
wfrv is a TV affiliate of the network cbs_evening_news	1116	12-sep-2018	93.8
large_herds is a generalization of springbok	1111	06-jul-2018	99.6