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
ron_oswanski is an actor	1111	06-jul-2018	91.3
eulophidae is a mollusk	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
david_hallstrom is a CEO	1111	06-jul-2018	91.3
james_lowery ia a celebrity	1111	06-jul-2018	90.5
bright_orange_glow is a perception event	1111	06-jul-2018	97.8
san_francisco is a city that lies on the river san_joaquin	1112	24-jul-2018	93.8
trout is a type of site	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
jason_larue plays the sport baseball	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
spiders is called brown_recluse_spiders	1111	06-jul-2018	96.9
emc has acquired rsa	1114	25-aug-2018	100.0