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
peugeot_307_2_0i_16v_hdi_136 is a kind of vehicle	1111	06-jul-2018	99.9
master_closets is a kind of room	1111	06-jul-2018	99.1
paned_vinyl is a building material	1111	06-jul-2018	90.9
c_e_b is a programming language	1111	06-jul-2018	98.1
two_part_mold is a fungus	1111	06-jul-2018	94.5
dan_quayle is a U.S. politician endorsed by the U.S. politician bush	1112	24-jul-2018	98.4
colby_rasmus plays for the team cardinals_27_23	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
dutch is the language of the country belgium	1114	25-aug-2018	99.8
herodotus is in the academic field history	1115	03-sep-2018	100.0
hebrew is a language used in the university columbia_university	1116	12-sep-2018	99.6