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
the_wonderful_story_of_henry_sugar_and_six_more is a book	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
the_brothers_seven is a musical artist	1111	06-jul-2018	97.1
guilford_technical_community_college___jamestown is a train station	1111	06-jul-2018	99.0
soil_bacteria is a bacterium	1111	06-jul-2018	91.3
alfred_birkfeld is a monarch	1111	06-jul-2018	96.4
sophie has husband edward	1116	12-sep-2018	93.8
general_motors is a company also known as gm	1114	25-aug-2018	100.0
interior_decorating is an academic program at the university college	1112	24-jul-2018	93.8
grover_cleveland is the leader of the city buffalo	1116	12-sep-2018	93.8
marco_polo_airport is a generalization of temple_of_the_reclining_buddha	1115	03-sep-2018	100.0