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
harsh_breeze is a weather phenomenon	1111	06-jul-2018	98.7
chocolate_foil_baseball_bears is a kind of candy	1111	06-jul-2018	96.9
ambient_hotel_colina is a place to ski	1111	06-jul-2018	90.6
caridae is an arthropod	1111	06-jul-2018	97.2
invasion_engineering is an area of study within the field of machine learning	1112	24-jul-2018	99.9
braylon_edwards and end_kellen_winslow are teammates	1111	06-jul-2018	93.8
chicken is an animal that eats stir_fried_vegetables	1115	03-sep-2018	96.9
new_york_aquarium is an aquarium in the city new_york	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
ryan_madson is an athlete that flied out to position center	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
ectoparasites is a type of ticks	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0