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
paul_scherrer is a scientist	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
four_major_islands can be a part of a landscape	1111	06-jul-2018	99.3
important_advisor is a profession	1111	06-jul-2018	96.5
buick_enclave_engines is a kind of automobile engine	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
msn_hotmail is a website	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
animals is an animal that is a kind of spiders	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
united_nations is headquartered in the country us	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
christian graduated from state_university	1112	24-jul-2018	99.2
mesa is the capital city of the state or province az	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
conocophillips is a bank that has james_mulva as its CEO	1116	12-sep-2018	98.4