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
militant_islamic_organization is a terrorist organization	1111	06-jul-2018	99.7
mckinley_street is a street	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
calico_spider is an arachnid	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
a_friend_of_the_earth is a book	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
large_faucet is an item often found in a bathroom	1111	06-jul-2018	99.8
crustaceans is a type of marine_animals	1113	15-aug-2018	100.0
new_york_magazine is a newspaper in the city new_york	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
pueblo_zoo is a zoo in the city pueblo	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
youtube operates the website youtube_com	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
kbia is a radio station in the city columbia	1116	12-sep-2018	98.4