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
joey_gathright is a Mexican person	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
anchorage is a city	1111	06-jul-2018	99.7
legal_momentum is a political organization that is not part of the government	1111	06-jul-2018	92.7
illustrators_magazine is a magazine	1111	06-jul-2018	99.9
arteria_thyreoidea_caudalis is an artery	1111	06-jul-2018	99.5
rafael_furcal is an athlete who led cardinals_27_23	1116	12-sep-2018	93.8
news is headquartered in the city new_york	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
novell has acquired suse	1114	25-aug-2018	100.0
kevin_rudd held the position of prime_minister	1115	03-sep-2018	100.0
ellison is a top member of oracle	1116	12-sep-2018	99.4