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
troy_francis is an African person	1111	06-jul-2018	90.4
early_leather_football_helmets is sports equipment	1111	06-jul-2018	94.7
certain_tree is a plant	1111	06-jul-2018	99.6
n10_28 is a dataset used within the scientific field of machine learning	1112	24-jul-2018	100.0
charlene_proctor is a journalist	1111	06-jul-2018	91.4
alvin_e___dodd got married in n1921	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
jerusalem is the capital city of the state or province jewish_state	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
contact_the_ministry is a synonym for services	1111	06-jul-2018	93.8
kgpe is a TV station in the city fresno	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
spiders is an animal that is a kind of pests	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0