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
ashland_community_college is a sports team	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
frenchtown is a geopolitical entity that is a location	1111	06-jul-2018	92.1
southern_red_salamander is a reptile	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
texas_station_gambling_hall is a place to ski	1111	06-jul-2018	90.4
spruce_tree is a plant	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
virgin is a company that has an office in the city san_francisco	1112	24-jul-2018	100.0
chicken is an animal that eats rosemary	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
portuguese is the language of the country east_timor	1114	25-aug-2018	99.2
kipling001 was born in bombay	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
division is an organization also known as service	1112	24-jul-2018	99.6