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
n27_20_loss is an event outcome	1111	06-jul-2018	99.9
flat_bread is a baked good	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
sveta_egorova is a fashion model	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
sarah_dolliver is an African person	1111	06-jul-2018	91.4
united_brotherhood_of_carpenters_and_joiners is a trade union	1111	06-jul-2018	95.2
black_pepper is an agricultural product that is usually cooked with honey	1114	25-aug-2018	99.6
kuop is a radio station in the city sacramento	1116	12-sep-2018	93.8
large_herds is a generalization of antelope	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
william_cohen is in the academic field computer_science	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
pixar_animation_studios terminated the employment of steve_jobs	1114	25-aug-2018	100.0