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
union_college is a sports team	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
hair_dryer_of is a personal care product	1111	06-jul-2018	96.2
carolyn_mackler is an Australian person	1111	06-jul-2018	99.9
bushy_tailed_woodrat is a mammal	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
democratic_force_or_fd is a political party	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
huggins works for west_virginia	1111	06-jul-2018	96.9
midge_ure is a musician who is part of ultravox	1113	15-aug-2018	96.9
emperor_meiji is a person who died on the date n1912	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
dc is taller than two_million_people	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
baltimore_orioles is a sports team that plays the sport baseball	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0