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
sessile_barnacles is a crustacean	1111	06-jul-2018	99.5
table_linen is a visualizable object	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
summer_ice is a weather phenomenon	1111	06-jul-2018	98.4
audi_tt_cars is a kind of vehicle	1111	06-jul-2018	99.5
hockey_goalie_sticks is sports equipment	1111	06-jul-2018	95.7
zoo_negara is an aquarium in the city kuala_lumpur	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
spiders is an arthropod as well as black_widow_spiders also is	1111	06-jul-2018	96.9
super_bowl_xliv_the_indianapolis_colts is a sports team that played in playoff	1113	15-aug-2018	93.8
soccer is a sport taught in the country south_africa	1116	12-sep-2018	99.9
bugs is an animal that preys on spiders	1111	06-jul-2018	99.6