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
china_folding_table is a kind of furniture	1111	06-jul-2018	99.4
afghan_communist_party is a political party	1112	24-jul-2018	100.0
thin_bone is a bone	1114	25-aug-2018	94.0
billie_johnson is an astronaut	1111	06-jul-2018	99.6
regents_park_area is a monument	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
the companies the_new_york_times and chicago001 compete with eachother	1111	06-jul-2018	99.9
spiders is an arthropod as well as tarantulas also is	1111	06-jul-2018	98.4
parts has shape triangle	1112	24-jul-2018	99.2
richard_wright wrote the book native_son	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
spider_mites is an animal that preys on insects	1111	06-jul-2018	99.5