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
cloud_forest_treefrog is an amphibian	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
tainter_lake is a trail	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
hit is a city	1111	06-jul-2018	99.8
santa_pola is a geopolitical entity that is a location	1111	06-jul-2018	93.5
desert_patchnose_snake is a reptile	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
duck is an animal that eats goat_cheese	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
alex_chilton is a musician who is part of big_star	1115	03-sep-2018	93.8
christine_hauser is a journalist that writes for the publication times	1112	24-jul-2018	99.6
thomas is a politician who holds the office of president	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
israel is the father of jesus_christ	1116	12-sep-2018	96.9