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
sarah_lancaster is a female	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
llama is an animal	1111	06-jul-2018	95.5
example_council_tax is a musical artist	1111	06-jul-2018	98.2
tour_de_lavenir is a sporting event	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
n1_9_percentage_points is a machine-learning algorithm	1111	06-jul-2018	99.7
uk_department is headquartered in the country us	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
mini is a specific automobile maker dealer in virginia	1114	25-aug-2018	93.8
terry_moran is a person who belongs to the organization abc_news	1111	06-jul-2018	96.9
clinton is a U.S. politician who holds the office of former_assistant_secretary	1115	03-sep-2018	100.0
air_canada_center is the home venue for the sports team leafs	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0