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
city_sightseeing_san_francisco is a building	1111	06-jul-2018	91.8
great_crested_newt is an animal	1111	06-jul-2018	98.1
manuel_chaves is a South American person	1111	06-jul-2018	98.4
john_gayle is an astronaut	1111	06-jul-2018	99.7
alfred_winslow_jones is a monarch	1111	06-jul-2018	96.6
william_friedkin directed the movie exorcist	1112	24-jul-2018	93.8
dragonflies is an arthropod as well as insects also is	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
football_players is a generalization of brad_childress	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
the sport baseball was played at n1999_world_series	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
incheon_international_airport is a generalization of temple_of_the_reclining_buddha	1114	25-aug-2018	100.0