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
gregory_simon is an Australian person	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
lymph_nodes_clavical is a lymph node	1111	06-jul-2018	99.7
clarence_w__nelson is an astronaut	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
bath_enclosure is an item often found in a bathroom	1111	06-jul-2018	99.9
col_nac__tte__e__martinez is a South American person	1111	06-jul-2018	96.0
usa is a country also known as china	1111	06-jul-2018	98.4
chicago_o_hare is an attraction that will be fall in city chicago_south	1116	12-sep-2018	96.9
brasstown_bald is a mountain in the state or province georgia	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
krcg_tv is a TV affiliate of the network cbs_evening_news	1116	12-sep-2018	99.2
sure_barack is a politician who holds the office of president	1115	03-sep-2018	96.9