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
april_21_2011 is a date	1111	06-jul-2018	96.8
methyl_3_methoxy_4_methylbenzoate is a chemical	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
the_citizen is a political blog	1111	06-jul-2018	98.9
alameda_sun is a location	1115	03-sep-2018	99.2
cathy_owen is a fashion model	1111	06-jul-2018	91.3
tokyo is a city that lies on the river grand	1113	15-aug-2018	100.0
hillary_clinton is a person who was written about in the_economist	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
adam_morrison is a person also known as miller002	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
luis_castillo is an athlete that flied out to position center	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
object_storage occurrs in the building doherty_hall	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0