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
comment_name_e_mail_website_join is software used by machine-learning scientists	1111	06-jul-2018	99.7
colorado_community_revitalization_association is a professional organization	1111	06-jul-2018	90.9
deborah_frazier is american	1111	06-jul-2018	91.6
wong_ying is an Asian person	1111	06-jul-2018	99.9
craig_neilson is an Australian person	1111	06-jul-2018	91.2
steve001 is an athlete who injured his/her shoulder	1112	24-jul-2018	100.0
bubba_smith plays in the league nfl	1116	12-sep-2018	94.1
the country the_united_kingdom uses the currency pounds	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
yugoslav_federation is a country located in the geopolitical location romania	1111	06-jul-2018	98.4
springfield is the capital city of the state or province illinois	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0