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
musical_producer is a profession	1111	06-jul-2018	97.2
deputy_secretary is a kind of office held by a politician	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
petricolidae is an insect	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
collins_cow_hole_cave is a cave	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
another_anime___con is a convention	1111	06-jul-2018	99.8
shanghai_museum is a museum in the city shanghai	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
chelsea has been charged with murder	1115	03-sep-2018	100.0
tom_bradley is the leader of the city los_angeles_ca	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
press_enterprise is a newspaper in the city riverside	1116	12-sep-2018	96.9
spiders is called black_widows	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0