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
middle_school_language_arts_teacher is a political issue	1111	06-jul-2018	99.8
ugg is a kind of clothing	1111	06-jul-2018	90.1
dining_room_with_balcony is a kind of room	1111	06-jul-2018	98.9
maurizio_pollini is a musician	1111	06-jul-2018	99.7
livestock is an animal that eats seeds	1115	03-sep-2018	100.0
jonas_salk is a person who died on the date n1995	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
sega is related to master_system	1114	25-aug-2018	99.6
landmines is a type of weapon produced in china	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
black_pepper is an agricultural product that is usually cooked with oil	1114	25-aug-2018	100.0