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
disease_persons is a physiological condition	1111	06-jul-2018	90.7
leisure_jacket is a kind of clothing	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
consequentialist_theory is an academic field	1111	06-jul-2018	91.2
jim_thorpe is an athlete	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
american_woman_s_society is a professional organization	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
abraham_lincoln represents the region us	1115	03-sep-2018	98.4
george_johnson is a person also known as david_carr	1115	03-sep-2018	100.0
nicholas_wade is a journalist that writes for the publication new_york_times	1111	06-jul-2018	99.2
rick and paul001 are siblings	1114	25-aug-2018	93.8
safina is an athlete who wins french_open	1114	25-aug-2018	100.0