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
carletta_bean is a legume	1111	06-jul-2018	98.0
information_staff is a scientific term	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
mount_haleakala is a mountain	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
protective_ball is sports equipment	1111	06-jul-2018	96.8
contact_king_county is a book	1111	06-jul-2018	91.2
spiders is called black_widow_spiders	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
kunm is a radio station in the city albuquerque	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
philip is a person who graduated from the university college	1115	03-sep-2018	99.9
spiders is an animal that is a kind of black_widow	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
reddy_conference_room_4405 is a room in the building gates_and_hillman_centers	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0