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
parmessan_cheese is a cheese	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
titanium_carbon_nitride is a building material	1111	06-jul-2018	98.8
discovery_girls is a publication	1111	06-jul-2018	91.7
empoli is a wine	1111	06-jul-2018	93.7
piedmont_oklahoma is a beach	1111	06-jul-2018	92.3
equestrian is a sport taught in the country __america	1116	12-sep-2018	99.6
sharks is a type of vertebrates	1115	03-sep-2018	100.0
charles_schwab is a company in the economic sector of investment	1111	06-jul-2018	94.0
wolf_spiders is an arthropod as well as spiders also is	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
dvd looks like projector	1111	06-jul-2018	93.8