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
suzie_johnson is a journalist	1111	06-jul-2018	98.0
vibrio_carchariae is a bacterium	1111	06-jul-2018	92.7
senate_natural_resources_committee is a political party	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
chestnut_capped_warbler is a bird	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
english_french_spanish is a language	1111	06-jul-2018	99.6
south_east_asia is a synonym for china	1111	06-jul-2018	93.8
suvs is a product produced in soviet_union	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
crows is an animal that eats seeds	1115	03-sep-2018	100.0
amy_macdonald is a person born on the date n1987	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
baseball_players is a generalization of jackie_robinson	1115	03-sep-2018	100.0