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
chevy_truck_c3100 is a kind of vehicle	1111	06-jul-2018	99.6
giant_octopus is a mollusk	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
n02_21_2008 is a date	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
robert_lee is a Mexican person	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
poker_rights is a socio-political term	1111	06-jul-2018	94.1
side_dishes is a generalization of beans	1114	25-aug-2018	96.9
the sports leage busch_series uses the venue international_speedway	1114	25-aug-2018	98.4
spanish_language is a language taught in language schools in the city valencia	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
cattle refers to more than one entire_herd	1112	24-jul-2018	93.8
tennessean is a newspaper in the city nashville	1116	12-sep-2018	96.9