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
kenneth_g__ross is a scientist	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
robert_perez is a criminal	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
university_of_illinois_at_urbana_champaign is a school	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
parti_de_liberation_kanak is a political party	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
calumet_street is a street	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
senator_barack_obama represents the region state001	1116	12-sep-2018	99.8
agassi is an athlete who wins australian_open	1114	25-aug-2018	100.0
zoloft is a drug worked on by pfizer	1114	25-aug-2018	100.0
national is a bank that bought treasury	1114	25-aug-2018	100.0
tim_burton directed the movie edward_scissorhands	1115	03-sep-2018	100.0