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
trinidad_mahogany_brown_tarantula is an arachnid	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
eagles_landing_winery is a winery	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
whitish_light is a perception event	1111	06-jul-2018	96.7
love_walked_in is a song	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
green_front_door is an item often found in a hallway	1111	06-jul-2018	99.7
p_j__brown is a person also known as j_p__howell	1115	03-sep-2018	100.0
michael_crichton is a person who died at the age of 66	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
baseball is a sport played in the venue comerica	1114	25-aug-2018	100.0
murder_weapon is a generalization of nuclear_missile	1115	03-sep-2018	100.0
kbig is a radio station in the city los_angeles_ca	1116	12-sep-2018	93.8