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
doom_gothic_metal is a genre of music	1111	06-jul-2018	99.3
special_education_consultant is a kind of office held by a politician	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
john_f__blaha is an astronaut	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
pathway_students is a victim	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
language_this_article is a legislative bill	1111	06-jul-2018	91.5
spiders is an arthropod as well as brown_recluse also is	1112	24-jul-2018	100.0
john_marks is the leader of the city tallahassee	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
skiing is a sport taught in the country canada	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
emile_lahoud is a person who has age nonneginteger:n71	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
alessandra_stanley is a journalist that writes for the publication times	1112	24-jul-2018	99.9