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
ball_shapes is a geometric shape	1111	06-jul-2018	92.1
kathleen_walsh is a journalist	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
marshall_burns is a professor	1111	06-jul-2018	91.3
framed_mirror is an item often found in a bathroom	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
mexican_longtail_snake is a reptile	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
european_countries is a generalization of us	1116	12-sep-2018	96.9
lima is the capital city of the country peru	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
flowers is an agricultural product produced in south_africa	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
lake_blackshear is a lake in the state or province georgia	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
the companies photobucket and youtube compete with eachother	1111	06-jul-2018	93.8