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
barred_laughing_thrush is a bird	1112	24-jul-2018	100.0
justice_moses_chinhengo is a judge	1111	06-jul-2018	97.5
cit_group_inc is a company	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
california_coast_credit_union is a bank	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
coffee_choices is an agricultural product	1111	06-jul-2018	99.7
clinton is a U.S. politician endorsed by the U.S. politician sen__hillary_rodham_clinton	1111	06-jul-2018	93.8
virgin is the mother of jesus_christ	1116	12-sep-2018	93.5
san_francisco_state is an organization also known as state_university	1111	06-jul-2018	99.6
widow is an animal that is a kind of spiders	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
los_angeles_ca is a city that lies on the river grand	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0