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
taliban_guerrillas is a terrorist organization	1111	06-jul-2018	99.5
high_quality_home is a location	1112	24-jul-2018	99.6
snaefellsnes_og_hnappadalssysla is a state or a province	1111	06-jul-2018	96.9
national_journal_magazine is a newspaper	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
anchor_bay_entertainment is a record label	1111	06-jul-2018	95.6
european_countries is a generalization of bulgaria	1116	12-sep-2018	93.8
ford is a company that produces thunderbird	1114	25-aug-2018	100.0
karl_rove is a U.S. politician endorsed by the U.S. politician former_bush	1112	24-jul-2018	100.0
nine is the number of people killed in the event n1327689011	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
president_obama is a U.S. politician who is a member of the political group congress	1112	24-jul-2018	100.0