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
wascana_creek is a river	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
beaver_crossing_nebraska is a beach	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
shirt_front is a kind of clothing	1111	06-jul-2018	92.9
james_gore is an author in the scientific field of machine learning	1111	06-jul-2018	99.7
gas_plays is a weapon	1111	06-jul-2018	96.2
national is a bank that bought insured	1114	25-aug-2018	100.0
spiders is an arthropod as well as beneficial_insects also is	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
home is taller than son	1116	12-sep-2018	93.8
rome is a city located in the geopolitical location italy	1112	24-jul-2018	99.9
wannsee_conference happened on the date january_1942	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0