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
krk is a visualizable scene	1111	06-jul-2018	99.3
original_supreme_court is a part of the government	1111	06-jul-2018	95.4
number_two_pencils is an office supply	1115	03-sep-2018	92.3
joseph_conrad is a musician	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
university_of_tennessee_space_institute is a university	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
orly_taitz belongs to the ethnic group soviet	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
salamanca is a city located in the country spain	1116	12-sep-2018	98.4
english is the language of the country u_s_	1116	12-sep-2018	93.8
spiders is an arthropod as well as brown_recluse also is	1112	24-jul-2018	100.0
mortar_bombs is a type of weapon produced in israel	1114	25-aug-2018	99.9