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
movie_never_met_picasso is a movie	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
creative_writing_committee is a political organization that is not part of the government	1111	06-jul-2018	90.1
mr__show is a TV show	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
orthonormal_basis is a scientific term	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
coulee_creek is a river	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
abudl_karim_al_khawinay belongs to the ethnic group yemeni	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
president_jimmy_carter is a U.S. politician who holds the office of u_s__secretary	1115	03-sep-2018	100.0
james_monroe is a politician who holds the office of secretary	1115	03-sep-2018	99.9
the sport baseball was played at n1946_world_series	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
sponges is a type of sea_creatures	1113	15-aug-2018	100.0