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
yellow_spotted_newt is an amphibian	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
number_194 is a performance metric used by machine-learning scientists	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
azure_lake is a lake	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
services_coordinator is a kind of office held by a politician	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
northern_pinesnake is a reptile	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
heathrow is an airport in the city central_london	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
spiders is called black_widow_spiders	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
fountain_hills is a lake in the state or province arizona	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
henry was born in the city new_york	1116	12-sep-2018	99.2
houston_astros_1b_jeff_bagwell is a subpart of mlb	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0