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
urchin_emperor_shrimp is a crustacean	1111	06-jul-2018	99.7
lodge_at_big_falls is a hotel	1111	06-jul-2018	94.5
argentine_snake_necked_turtle is an amphibian	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
jelly_beans___bubble_gum is a kind of candy	1111	06-jul-2018	99.6
n10_18_11 is a dataset used within the scientific field of machine learning	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
anna_nicole_smith is a person who died at the age of nonneginteger:n39	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
wqow_tv is a TV affiliate of the network abc_news	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
recluse is a synonym for spiders	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
bats is an animal that eats seeds	1115	03-sep-2018	100.0
think is a specific automobile maker dealer in _uk	1116	12-sep-2018	96.9