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
knowledge_construction is a character trait	1111	06-jul-2018	99.0
crossroads_community_church is a religion	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
common_newt is an amphibian	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
capehart_nebraska is a beach	1111	06-jul-2018	92.0
michael_smith is a chef	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
hilton_brussels is a hotel in the city brussels	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
kftl is a company that has an office in the city san_francisco	1112	24-jul-2018	99.9
states is a state or province located in the geopolitical location china	1111	06-jul-2018	98.4
david_coleman_headley is a person who has age nonneginteger:n49	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
robert_de_niro is an actor that worked with the director brian_de_palma	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0