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
development_economics is a political issue	1111	06-jul-2018	99.9
todd_anderson is a politician	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
bodic_languages is a language	1111	06-jul-2018	98.7
movie_ghost_dog_the_way_of_the_samurai is a movie	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
alcoholic_drinks_software is a tool	1112	24-jul-2018	99.6
theo_van_gogh held the position of filmmaker	1115	03-sep-2018	100.0
tarantulas is an arthropod as well as arachnids also is	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
birch is a plant that is a kind of burls	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
blanchard is a city located in the state or province oklahoma	1116	12-sep-2018	93.8
dunedin is a city that lies on the river taieri	1112	24-jul-2018	93.8