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
robert_foley is a criminal	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
west_virginia_university is a school	1113	15-aug-2018	100.0
n1898___1995 is a year	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
leadership_development_program is an academic field	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
small_leaves is a vegetable	1111	06-jul-2018	97.7
morgan_stanley is a bank in scotland	1114	25-aug-2018	93.8
toni_morrison wrote the book beloved	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
people is a company that has an office in the country china	1111	06-jul-2018	99.2
xom_ is a company also known as exxonmobil001	1114	25-aug-2018	100.0
scarlett_johansson is an actor that worked with the director woody_allen	1114	25-aug-2018	100.0