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
resulting_mold is a fungus	1111	06-jul-2018	95.3
ub_post is a publication	1111	06-jul-2018	95.6
holiday_snow is software used by machine-learning scientists	1111	06-jul-2018	99.6
downtown_san_francisco is a visualizable scene	1111	06-jul-2018	99.7
essay_comments is a product	1111	06-jul-2018	91.4
rifle is a type of weapon produced in china	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
lieberman is a U.S. politician endorsed by the U.S. politician al_gore	1113	15-aug-2018	99.9
chicken is an animal that eats crispy_bacon	1115	03-sep-2018	100.0
george looks like cable	1113	15-aug-2018	93.8
soluble_fiber can cause blood_cholesterol_levels	1114	25-aug-2018	96.3