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
viccomiccon is a convention	1111	06-jul-2018	99.9
miami_sun is a location	1111	06-jul-2018	95.9
class_form is a machine-learning conference	1111	06-jul-2018	99.2
first_female_commissioner is a job position	1111	06-jul-2018	97.8
technical_secretary is a profession	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
san_antonio is a city that lies on the river grand	1112	24-jul-2018	99.6
hayes is a politician who holds the office of president	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
quarterback_brett_favre is an athlete who injured his/her eyes	1115	03-sep-2018	98.4
washington_dulles is a generalization of temple_of_the_reclining_buddha	1114	25-aug-2018	100.0
pavement is a musician in the genre rock	1111	06-jul-2018	99.9