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
tropical_colours is a visualizable attribute	1111	06-jul-2018	90.6
busoni is a musician	1111	06-jul-2018	94.2
import_specialist is a profession	1111	06-jul-2018	96.1
chalimo is a musical instrument	1111	06-jul-2018	93.8
n20_40_years is a non-disease physiological condition	1111	06-jul-2018	92.3
kathmandu is the capital city of the country nepal	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
raptors is a sports team that plays against sixers	1111	06-jul-2018	99.6
him contributed to the creative work commandments	1113	15-aug-2018	100.0
the country u_s__officials uses the currency won	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
michael_leahy is a journalist that writes for the publication washington	1113	15-aug-2018	93.8