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
generalized_clock is an item found on a wall	1111	06-jul-2018	99.5
argentina_car is a product	1111	06-jul-2018	90.6
broad_banded_so__water_snake is a reptile	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
six_nutrients is a food	1111	06-jul-2018	98.3
bismuth_bromide is a chemical	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
diane_olson belongs to the religion jewish	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
dodd_hall is a building belonging to ucla	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
wruw is a radio station in the city cleveland	1116	12-sep-2018	93.8
larger_animals is an animal that is a kind of wolves	1112	24-jul-2018	93.8
andy_bechtolsheim is a top member of sun_microsystems	1116	12-sep-2018	96.9