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
citizens_certain_rights is a socio-political term	1111	06-jul-2018	95.6
galia_melon is a fruit	1111	06-jul-2018	99.4
naked_in_death is a book	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
greenwich_town_centre is a skyscraper	1111	06-jul-2018	99.9
buckelgong is a musical instrument	1111	06-jul-2018	93.8
college is an organization also known as southern	1111	06-jul-2018	99.6
black_widow is an animal that is a kind of spiders	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
dragonflies is an arthropod that looks like damselflies	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
rifle is a type of weapon produced in china	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
skiing is a sport taught in the country canada	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0