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
blow_moulds is a fungus	1111	06-jul-2018	90.2
fukuyama_city_zoo is an aquarium	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
brown_legged_hermit_crab is a crustacean	1111	06-jul-2018	99.7
alpherius is a monarch	1111	06-jul-2018	98.5
dennis_hopper is a visual artist	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
sheep is an agricultural product grown in area	1113	15-aug-2018	93.8
esteban_loaiza is an athlete that flied out to position center	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
cycling is a sport with fans in the country __america	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
zacarias_moussaoui belongs to the ethnic group french	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
new_orleans_arena is the home venue for the sports team new_orleans_hornets	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0