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
cardinal_spider is an arachnid	1112	24-jul-2018	100.0
jonathan_woodward is an author in the scientific field of machine learning	1111	06-jul-2018	99.9
view_images is form of visual art	1111	06-jul-2018	98.3
oregon_students is a victim	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
different_glow is a perception event	1111	06-jul-2018	96.0
nate_mclouth plays the sport baseball	1116	12-sep-2018	98.4
nate_mclouth is an athlete who led pirates	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
moses and samuel are siblings	1112	24-jul-2018	93.8
samsung is a company also known as sony	1114	25-aug-2018	93.8
european_nations is a generalization of finland	1115	03-sep-2018	96.9