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
alice_through_the_looking_glass is a book	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
chico_area is a building	1111	06-jul-2018	95.3
world_futures_society is a non-profit organization	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
tour_de_grove is a sports race	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
potter_wasp is an arthropod	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
htilominlo_temple is a place of worship that practices the religion of buddhism	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
southern is an organization also known as college	1111	06-jul-2018	99.6
bob_howry plays for the team chicago_cubs	1116	12-sep-2018	93.8
recluse is an arthropod as well as spiders also is	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
ticks is an animal that eats dog	1116	12-sep-2018	99.4