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
fernanda_motta is a female	1111	06-jul-2018	98.5
chris_navi is a politician	1111	06-jul-2018	91.3
nose_horned_viper is a reptile	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
chris_tolamalu is an African person	1111	06-jul-2018	90.8
charleroi_airport is a transportation system	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
george_carlin is a person who died at the age of 71	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
oscar_wilde wrote the book an_ideal_husband	1113	15-aug-2018	100.0
sweets is an agricultural product produced in india	1115	03-sep-2018	99.5
xml_feed_tweet_seattle_mariners is a sports team that played in championship	1113	15-aug-2018	96.9
adam_bostick is an athlete that flied out to position center	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0