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
julian_christopher is an Australian person	1111	06-jul-2018	99.8
the_first_church_of_the_spirit_and_truth is a religion	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
class_guid is a machine-learning conference	1112	24-jul-2018	94.7
finno_ugrian_languages is a language	1111	06-jul-2018	99.6
hazel_green is a geopolitical entity that is a location	1111	06-jul-2018	92.2
mahalalel is the father of jared	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
chevrolet is a specific automobile maker dealer in texas	1114	25-aug-2018	96.9
zen_mountain_monastery is a place of worship that practices the religion of buddhism	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
spiders is an arthropod as well as widow also is	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
straight_lines has shape angle	1112	24-jul-2018	93.8