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
ann_mitchell is a female	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
second_street_bridge is a bridge	1111	06-jul-2018	97.5
copper_colored_metal is a building material	1111	06-jul-2018	98.9
last_minute_valentine is a visualizable scene	1111	06-jul-2018	99.7
micromonospora_viridifaciens is a bacterium	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
cleveland is the home city of the sports team cleveland_cavaliers	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
giuliani is a U.S. politician who holds the office of mayor	1115	03-sep-2018	100.0
shea is the home venue for the sports team new_york_mets	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
iran is a country located in the geopolitical location foreign_countries	1112	24-jul-2018	96.9
sony was responsible for launch_of_ps3	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0