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
newer_american is an ethnic group	1111	06-jul-2018	95.5
bomb_fragments is a weapon	1111	06-jul-2018	97.4
fleur_des_fagnes_cheese is a cheese	1111	06-jul-2018	95.6
kate_northgate is a scientist	1111	06-jul-2018	92.4
kim_anderson is an Asian person	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
alexander and nicholas are siblings	1112	24-jul-2018	93.8
htilominlo_temple is a place of worship that practices the religion of buddhism	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
florida_times_union is a newspaper in the city jacksonville	1116	12-sep-2018	99.8
don_burke works for newark_star_ledger	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
pudong is a city that lies on the river huangpu	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0