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
joan_manuel_serrat is a South American person	1111	06-jul-2018	95.9
chestnut_short_tailed_bat is a mammal	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
jane_clayson is a female	1111	06-jul-2018	99.9
high_quality_gasoline is a refinery product	1112	24-jul-2018	98.7
william_kelley is a visual artist	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
mother is the mother of elizabeth	1116	12-sep-2018	93.8
the sport baseball was played at n2003_world_series	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
the home stadium of joe_tinker is wrigley_field	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
oklahoma_city is a city also known as washington_d_c_	1113	15-aug-2018	93.8
owens_corning is a company headquartered in the city sydney	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0