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
rhinoceros_ratsnake is a reptile	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
beautiful_silver is a color	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
human_pheromone_sciences_inc is a biotech company	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
rutland_street is a street	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
beautiful_silver is a visualizable attribute	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
recluse is an arthropod as well as recluse_spider also is	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
obama is a person who was written about in associated_press	1115	03-sep-2018	99.6
european_states is a generalization of germany	1115	03-sep-2018	93.8
abraham and lot are siblings	1112	24-jul-2018	93.8
newsday is a company that has an office in the city los_angeles_ca	1111	06-jul-2018	93.8