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
saltines is a visualizable thing	1111	06-jul-2018	95.5
car_table is a kind of furniture	1111	06-jul-2018	99.7
chris_lambert is an athlete	1111	06-jul-2018	99.6
gold_huggie_earrings is a visualizable attribute	1111	06-jul-2018	90.3
michael_richard is a criminal	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
n44 is the number of people that died in the event n2008_lake_kivu_earthquake	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
lobster is a type of crustaceans	1113	15-aug-2018	96.9
george_a__romero directed the movie night_of_the_living_dead	1114	25-aug-2018	98.4
recluse is an animal that is a kind of spiders	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
the coach shaun_alexander won the trophy or tournament super_bowl	1113	15-aug-2018	100.0