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
william_yates is a scientist	1111	06-jul-2018	99.9
john_gatens is a writer	1111	06-jul-2018	91.5
andrea_lillio is an architect	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
aicctu_affiliated_unions is a trade union	1111	06-jul-2018	90.8
manuel_de_la_revilla is a South American person	1111	06-jul-2018	97.5
kelly is a person who belongs to the organization state_university	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
jack_nicklaus_and_pete_dye is an athlete who beat legendary_arnold_palmer	1114	25-aug-2018	100.0
canadian_islamic_congress is an organization known by the acronym cic	1114	25-aug-2018	100.0
the_travelers_companies terminated the employment of jay	1114	25-aug-2018	100.0
bernie_williams coaches the team yankees	1116	12-sep-2018	99.6