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
pool_swim is a sport	1111	06-jul-2018	99.9
mateo_gil is a director	1111	06-jul-2018	98.0
mount_bozgush is a mountain	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
breast_removal_lymph_nodes is a lymph node	1111	06-jul-2018	99.6
hairy_squat_lobster is a crustacean	1111	06-jul-2018	99.9
ocean_journey is an aquarium in the city denver	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
dozens is the number of people injured in the event blast_hits_bangkok	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
john_steinbeck wrote the book cannery_row	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
larger_animals is an animal that is a kind of cats	1112	24-jul-2018	100.0
black_widows is called spiders	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0