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
justice_arun_kumar is a judge	1111	06-jul-2018	98.2
widespread_recipe is a recipe	1111	06-jul-2018	99.7
growthiness is a physical characteristic	1113	15-aug-2018	100.0
union_dla_the_new_republic is a political party	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
ruins_of_saint_paul_s_cathedral is a place of worship	1112	24-jul-2018	99.8
ebay is headquartered in the city san_jose	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
spiders is an animal that is a kind of black_widow_spiders	1111	06-jul-2018	93.8
stephen_labaton is a journalist that writes for the publication new_york_times	1112	24-jul-2018	93.8
reds is a sports team that won the world_series	1114	25-aug-2018	100.0
tsunami_relief happened on the date n2005	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0