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
n11_19_56 is a term used by physicists	1111	06-jul-2018	92.3
community_church_of_the_nazarene is a religion	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
anthony_johnson is a male	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
full_faced_helmet is sports equipment	1111	06-jul-2018	97.5
n12584 is a ZIP code	1111	06-jul-2018	99.8
split is the capital city of the state or province dalmatia	1116	12-sep-2018	99.2
federal_national_mortgage_association is an organization known by the acronym fannie_mae	1111	06-jul-2018	98.4
president_clinton is a politician who holds the office of former_assistant_secretary	1115	03-sep-2018	93.8
u_s is a bank that has richard_davis as its CEO	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
phil_condit is the CEO of boeing	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0