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
specific_economic_problems is a disease	1111	06-jul-2018	90.5
overnight_meeting is a perception action	1111	06-jul-2018	93.0
n1932_1957_and_1960 is a year	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
polina_kondratikova is a fashion model	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
sarah_lancaster is an actor	1111	06-jul-2018	99.5
mccain is a U.S. politician endorsed by the U.S. politician bob_barr	1112	24-jul-2018	98.4
cells is a subpart of the body within autologous_bone_marrow	1111	06-jul-2018	99.6
toni_morrison wrote the book the_bluest_eye	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
tim_burton directed the movie charlie_and_the_chocolate_factory	1115	03-sep-2018	100.0
bush is a person who was written about in new_york_times	1115	03-sep-2018	100.0