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
pointe_magazine is a newspaper	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
stone_and_allied_products_workers_of_america is a trade union	1111	06-jul-2018	91.0
michael_morales is a criminal	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
world_war_ii_farm is a farm	1111	06-jul-2018	99.8
new_york_lieutenant_governor is a kind of office held by a politician	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
phil_gordon is the leader of the city downtown_phoenix	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
samuel_j__palmisano is a top member of ibm	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
bed is often found in foot_unit	1111	06-jul-2018	93.8
tohoku_shinkansen is a transportation system located in the city tokyo	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
williams and kevin_love are teammates	1111	06-jul-2018	93.8