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
katherine_meadows is a female	1111	06-jul-2018	96.7
n8_00_7_00 is a time	1112	24-jul-2018	100.0
stella_cilento is a visualizable scene	1111	06-jul-2018	99.7
newport_arkansas is a beach	1111	06-jul-2018	99.9
alabama_appleseed is a political organization that is not part of the government	1111	06-jul-2018	90.6
barack is a U.S. politician who holds the office of u_s__presidency	1111	06-jul-2018	93.8
james_madison is a politician who holds the office of president	1115	03-sep-2018	100.0
carroll plays the athletic team position left_field	1113	15-aug-2018	93.8
eggs is an agricultural product coming from hawksbill_turtle	1112	24-jul-2018	98.4
sweets is an agricultural product produced in india	1115	03-sep-2018	99.5