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
liquid_clock is an item found on a wall	1111	06-jul-2018	99.5
midwestern_grain is a grain	1112	24-jul-2018	93.7
significant_additional_progress is a socio-political term	1111	06-jul-2018	91.4
real_travel_magazine is a magazine	1111	06-jul-2018	99.9
serials_review is a publication	1111	06-jul-2018	91.1
enkhuizen is a city located in the country netherlands	1116	12-sep-2018	99.6
spiders is an animal that is a kind of black_widow_spiders	1111	06-jul-2018	93.8
fdr represents the region states	1113	15-aug-2018	100.0
spider_mites is an arthropod as well as insects also is	1111	06-jul-2018	99.9
crestone_peak is related to north_america	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0