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
funny_magazines is a kind of media	1111	06-jul-2018	99.0
harsh_breeze is a weather phenomenon	1111	06-jul-2018	98.7
gabriel_garcia_m_rquez is a professor	1111	06-jul-2018	91.0
class_quality_service is a machine-learning conference	1111	06-jul-2018	97.7
willis_brown is a male	1111	06-jul-2018	91.2
activesync is a synonym for microsoft_corporation001	1111	06-jul-2018	93.8
brett is a person who has attended the school college	1113	15-aug-2018	100.0
rocky_mountain is a mountain in the state or province colorado	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
state is an organization also known as wake_forest	1111	06-jul-2018	93.8
larger_animals is an animal that preys on cattle	1112	24-jul-2018	100.0