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
cotton_plant is a plant	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
sawin_museum is a museum	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
joshua_malina is a fashion model	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
richard_j__kellso is a scientist	1111	06-jul-2018	99.9
cat_sound_alarm_clock is an item often found in a bedroom	1111	06-jul-2018	99.8
john_mcenroe is an athlete who wins wimbledon	1115	03-sep-2018	98.4
president_bill_clinton001 is related to president_bill_clinton	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
andrew_ross_sorkin is a journalist that writes for the publication new_york_times	1113	15-aug-2018	100.0
zebrafish is a type of vertebrates	1115	03-sep-2018	100.0
jim_calhoun is a person who belongs to the organization uconn	1111	06-jul-2018	99.2