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
digueti_straightbacked_clam_shrimp is a crustacean	1111	06-jul-2018	99.9
saint_peter_united_church_of_christ is a religion	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
tyson_devree is a Mexican person	1111	06-jul-2018	91.1
marseille_airport is a transportation port	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
tour_de_pei is a sports race	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
bathory is a musician in the genre black_metal	1112	24-jul-2018	99.2
laban is the father of pharaoh	1116	12-sep-2018	98.2
the country ireland uses the currency punt	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
hoeppner is a person who belongs to the organization indiana	1112	24-jul-2018	100.0
dutch is the language of the country surinam	1115	03-sep-2018	93.8