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
sweetness is a physical characteristic	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
action_punk is a genre of music	1111	06-jul-2018	98.7
justice_peter_cory is a judge	1111	06-jul-2018	98.3
sir_edward_appleton is a scientist	1111	06-jul-2018	96.2
michael_barrett is a U.S. politician	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
russian is the language of the country ussr	1114	25-aug-2018	100.0
nissan is a specific automobile maker dealer in houston	1114	25-aug-2018	100.0
the country cayman_islands uses the currency dollars	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
citroen is a specific automobile maker dealer in uk_	1116	12-sep-2018	96.9
yugoslav_federation is a country also known as usa	1111	06-jul-2018	93.8