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
lesser_bromeliad_treefrog is an animal	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
bipolar_type is a disease	1111	06-jul-2018	94.0
wave_tactics is a weapon	1111	06-jul-2018	97.1
bed_two is an item often found in a bedroom	1111	06-jul-2018	99.9
black_moshannon_creek is a trail	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
selene is the mother of ersa	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
senses is a subpart of the body within system	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
basketball is a sport played in the venue quicken_loans_arena	1114	25-aug-2018	100.0
andrew was born in the country usa	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
bobby_gillespie is a musician who is part of primal_scream	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0