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
china___xinyang is a country	1111	06-jul-2018	98.5
andreas_g__hofmann is an author in the scientific field of machine learning	1111	06-jul-2018	99.9
batting_gloves is sports equipment	1111	06-jul-2018	97.6
undirected_graphical_models is an area of study within the field of machine learning	1111	06-jul-2018	99.9
apopka is a city	1111	06-jul-2018	99.7
father is the parent of mary	1115	03-sep-2018	96.9
national is a company that has an office in the country sudan	1114	25-aug-2018	99.9
president_bill_clinton is a U.S. politician who holds the office of secretary	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
adventures is a generalization of hiking	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
terry_moran is a person who belongs to the organization abc_news	1111	06-jul-2018	96.9