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
terrence_dashon_howard is a male	1111	06-jul-2018	95.8
normal_nickel is a visualizable attribute	1111	06-jul-2018	90.7
sooty_shrike_thrush is a bird	1112	24-jul-2018	100.0
martin_damm is an athlete	1111	06-jul-2018	95.2
bourg is a city	1111	06-jul-2018	99.9
john_nash is a person who has attended the school carnegie_mellon	1114	25-aug-2018	100.0
compaq is an organization dissolved at the date n2002	1115	03-sep-2018	100.0
federal_aviation_administration is headquartered in the country us	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
jim_carrey starred in the movie mask	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
metra_rail is a transportation system located in the city chicago_south	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0