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
george_englund is a male	1111	06-jul-2018	95.2
white_wall_clock is an item found on a wall	1111	06-jul-2018	99.6
commercial_shrimp is a crustacean	1111	06-jul-2018	99.7
saint_lawrence_roman_catholic_church is a religion	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
wcfv is a TV station	1111	06-jul-2018	99.5
seattle_p_i is a company headquartered in the city seattle	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
baseball is a sport played in the venue oakland_alameda_county_coliseum	1114	25-aug-2018	93.8
kingston is the capital city of the country jamaica	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
deer is a type of larger_animals	1112	24-jul-2018	98.4
martina_hingis is an athlete who beat jana_novotna	1114	25-aug-2018	100.0