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
n41_club_cave is a cave	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
tresaca_hamilton is a writer	1111	06-jul-2018	91.2
grape_tea is a beverage	1111	06-jul-2018	99.9
psychrobacter_piscatorii is a bacterium	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
queen_poster_bed is a kind of furniture	1111	06-jul-2018	99.7
georgetown is a city also known as washington_d_c_	1113	15-aug-2018	100.0
monorail is a transportation system located in the city melbourne	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
joseph_conrad wrote the book secret_agent	1111	06-jul-2018	96.9
virginia_tech is a sports team that plays the sport football	1116	12-sep-2018	98.4
black_pepper is an agricultural product that is usually cooked with vinegar	1114	25-aug-2018	100.0