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
atlantic_cape_community_college_mays_landing is a train station	1111	06-jul-2018	99.6
highland_darter is a fish	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
pietro_da_rho_italian_pietro_da_rimini is a visual artist	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
texas_southern_university is a university	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
endurance_engineering is an area of study within the field of machine learning	1112	24-jul-2018	99.8
little_gas is a generalization of nuclear_missile	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
southern is an organization also known as college	1111	06-jul-2018	99.6
pests is a type of snails	1114	25-aug-2018	100.0
mike_mcshane works for norwich	1111	06-jul-2018	93.8
john_mccain is a person who has age 72	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0