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
white_winged_dog_like_bat is a mammal	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
lemonades is a beverage	1111	06-jul-2018	91.6
james_parrott is a director	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
super_robot_wars_3 is software	1112	24-jul-2018	100.0
particular_grass is a plant	1111	06-jul-2018	99.3
spiders is an arthropod as well as beneficial_insects also is	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
arcadia_university is a sports team that plays in the league international	1116	12-sep-2018	93.8
frank_williams is a top member of williams_jeep	1116	12-sep-2018	93.8
soccer is a sport taught in the country south_africa	1116	12-sep-2018	99.9
general_motors is an organization known by the acronym gm	1114	25-aug-2018	100.0