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
gossack_mountain is a mountain	1111	06-jul-2018	99.9
red_tomato is an agricultural product	1111	06-jul-2018	99.6
corresponding_facebook_page is an office supply	1112	24-jul-2018	96.0
lonely_planet_lonely_planet is a planet	1111	06-jul-2018	93.5
koh_pha_ngan is a visualizable scene	1111	06-jul-2018	99.2
anthony_smith plays the sport football	1116	12-sep-2018	90.7
baseball is a sport played in the venue ballpark_in_arlington	1115	03-sep-2018	100.0
hugh_hopper is a musician who is part of soft_machine	1114	25-aug-2018	98.4
large_herds is a generalization of elephants	1111	06-jul-2018	99.2
black_pepper is an agricultural product that is usually cooked with honey	1114	25-aug-2018	99.6