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
_metal is a genre of music	1111	06-jul-2018	99.1
glass_dog_door is an item often found in a hallway	1111	06-jul-2018	99.8
arabesque_orb_weaver is an arachnid	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
sue_long is a North American person	1111	06-jul-2018	91.2
sugar_cinnamon is a fruit	1111	06-jul-2018	99.7
andrew_wood is a musician who is part of malfunkshun	1112	24-jul-2018	93.8
swords is a type of weapon produced in china	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
southwest is a transportation system located in the city waterloo	1116	12-sep-2018	98.4
seals is a type of mammals	1114	25-aug-2018	100.0
chelsea is a person who graduated from the university college	1115	03-sep-2018	98.4