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
paper_card is an item found on a wall	1111	06-jul-2018	99.9
pandanus_leaves is a vegetable	1111	06-jul-2018	92.1
dinning_kitchen is a kind of room	1111	06-jul-2018	99.4
grains_ is a grain	1112	24-jul-2018	90.9
affinity_plus_fcu is a company	1111	06-jul-2018	99.9
chesapeake_bay is a lake in the state or province maryland	1116	12-sep-2018	99.9
aflac is a company in the economic sector of insurance	1114	25-aug-2018	100.0
n90 is the number of people injured in the event n1326222641	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
the_daily_telegraph is a newspaper in the city central_london	1116	12-sep-2018	93.8
european_countries is a generalization of spain	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0