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
kid_royal_mountain is a mountain	1111	06-jul-2018	99.9
buffalo_state_college_buffalo is a train station	1111	06-jul-2018	99.1
working_session is a perception action	1111	06-jul-2018	99.9
southern_plains_rat_snake is a reptile	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
walls_chapel_ame_zion_church is a religion	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
jeff_keppinger is an athlete who led tampa_bay_devil_rays	1116	12-sep-2018	93.8
arlington is the home city of the sports team loyola_marymount_university	1116	12-sep-2018	99.8
ray_ozzie is a top member of microsoft	1116	12-sep-2018	93.8
mother is the parent of lt__joseph_r__hunt	1115	03-sep-2018	99.6
widow is an arthropod as well as spiders also is	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0