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
line_difficulties is a visualizable attribute	1111	06-jul-2018	90.6
la_crosse_kansas is an island	1111	06-jul-2018	96.3
yellow_spotted_tropical_night_lizard is a reptile	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
shawn_everett is a North American person	1111	06-jul-2018	91.3
revised_study is a research project	1111	06-jul-2018	98.1
plain_water is a beverage made from juice	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
the home stadium of martin_havlat is wrigley_field	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
kelly graduated from college	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
layers is a subpart of water	1111	06-jul-2018	93.8
emissions is a chemical that is a kind of area	1114	25-aug-2018	93.8