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
glass_dog_door is an item often found in a hallway	1111	06-jul-2018	99.8
southern_ohio_college_fort_mitchell is a train station	1111	06-jul-2018	98.7
white_banded_crab_spider is an arachnid	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
great_veins is a vein	1111	06-jul-2018	97.2
line_subprime is a visualizable attribute	1111	06-jul-2018	90.4
stanford hired montgomery	1111	06-jul-2018	98.4
first_game is an event at the location new_south_wales	1116	12-sep-2018	93.8
peachtree_road is a street in the city atlanta	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
recluse_spider is called spider_bite	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
berkshire_hathaway is a company in the economic sector of insurance	1114	25-aug-2018	100.0