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
sporangiophores is a fungus	1111	06-jul-2018	91.8
castleton_ave is a highway	1111	06-jul-2018	93.2
spotted_scorpion is an arachnid	1112	24-jul-2018	100.0
ivy_tech_state_college_northeast is a train station	1111	06-jul-2018	99.7
medieval_dining_room is a kind of room	1111	06-jul-2018	99.5
edmond is a city located in the geopolitical location central001	1113	15-aug-2018	93.8
alice_cooper is a musician in the genre rock	1113	15-aug-2018	96.9
larger_pets is an animal that preys on dogs	1112	24-jul-2018	100.0
golf is a sport with fans in the country us	1115	03-sep-2018	100.0
john_stossel is a person who belongs to the organization abc_news	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0