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
first_female_commissioner is a job position	1111	06-jul-2018	97.8
bad_pokertexas is a board game	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
search_internet is an economic sector	1111	06-jul-2018	99.9
martin_damm is an athlete	1111	06-jul-2018	95.2
schiller_nationalmuseum is a museum	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
norbert_reithofer is the CEO of bmw	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
famotidine is a drug worked on by merck	1114	25-aug-2018	100.0
hayes is a politician who holds the office of president	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
theater_actors is a generalization of john_barrymore	1115	03-sep-2018	100.0
spiders is called black_widows	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0