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
great_billy_wilder is a male	1111	06-jul-2018	90.2
parlor_clock is an item often found in a bedroom	1111	06-jul-2018	99.9
yellow_breasted_barbet is a bird	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
dealers_engineering is an area of study within the field of machine learning	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
infections_trigger is a physiological condition	1111	06-jul-2018	94.5
edmonton is the capital city of the state or province alberta	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
john_bonham is a person who died on the date n1980	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
yugoslav_federation is a country also known as iraq	1111	06-jul-2018	93.8
dea is headquartered in the country u_s_	1116	12-sep-2018	99.2
elizabeth_blackwell has sister emily	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0