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
suzie_johnson is a journalist	1111	06-jul-2018	98.0
china___xinyang is a country	1111	06-jul-2018	98.5
metal_fabrication_tools is a tool	1111	06-jul-2018	98.9
pocker_game_texas is a board game	1112	24-jul-2018	100.0
brown_stream_snake is a reptile	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
mf_global is headquartered in the state or province new_york	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
south_bermondsey is a park in the city central_london	1116	12-sep-2018	94.1
rbs terminated the employment of fred_goodwin	1112	24-jul-2018	100.0
reptiles is an animal that preys on pets	1112	24-jul-2018	100.0
van_note plays the athletic team position left_center	1111	06-jul-2018	93.8