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
volunteer_coordinator is a job position	1111	06-jul-2018	95.0
stuart_russell is a professor	1111	06-jul-2018	90.9
gerd_oswald is a person	1111	06-jul-2018	94.1
medium_sized_banana is a fruit	1112	24-jul-2018	93.7
aiseesoft_flac_to_mp3_converter_for_mac is a video game system	1111	06-jul-2018	98.9
luis_castillo is an athlete that flied out to position center	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
dow_jones001 has acquired factiva	1112	24-jul-2018	93.8
spider_mites is a type of insects	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
seoul is the capital city of the country south_korea	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
national is a company that has an office in the country iraq	1114	25-aug-2018	100.0