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
black_carpenter_ant is an invertebrate	1111	06-jul-2018	96.2
giant_snake_necked_turtle is an amphibian	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
konstantin_p__feoktistov is an astronaut	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
waterless_cookware is an item found in the kitchen	1111	06-jul-2018	99.4
manuel_granell is a South American person	1111	06-jul-2018	96.0
display001 looks like receiver	1111	06-jul-2018	93.8
president and laura_bush are family members	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
brewers is a sports team that won the world_series	1112	24-jul-2018	96.9
kqed_tv is a company that has an office in the city san_francisco	1112	24-jul-2018	100.0
michael_hancock is the leader of the city denver	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0