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
n3_tables is a kind of furniture	1111	06-jul-2018	99.6
levallois_perret is a city	1111	06-jul-2018	99.8
business_insurance is a physical characteristic	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
paris_roubaix_juniors is a sports race	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
pirate_wolf_spider is an arachnid	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
atwell_hall is a building belonging to osu	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
lucy has husband peter	1116	12-sep-2018	93.8
russian_language is the language of the country russia	1113	15-aug-2018	96.9
spiders is called orb_weavers	1113	15-aug-2018	100.0
tv_actors is a generalization of lisa_kudrow	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0