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
white_claw_hermit_crab is a crustacean	1111	06-jul-2018	99.6
joel_torres is a North American person	1111	06-jul-2018	91.5
joseph_sullivan is an architect	1111	06-jul-2018	99.5
ichf is a conference	1111	06-jul-2018	99.0
bruce_mountain is a mountain	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
easyjet is a company that has an office in the city geneva	1112	24-jul-2018	100.0
flea an arthropod that can be very irritating to mammal dog	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
railway_station is the location of the event n16_killed_in_suicide_bombing_in_russia_s_south	1113	15-aug-2018	100.0
wahu_ca is a TV affiliate of the network fox	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
spanish is the language of the country central001	1113	15-aug-2018	100.0