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
givens_pond is a lake	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
devin_grayson is a person	1111	06-jul-2018	94.1
james_jenkins is a U.S. politician	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
errant_rockets is a weapon	1111	06-jul-2018	98.0
alicia_jones is an astronaut	1111	06-jul-2018	98.1
hayes is a politician who holds the office of president	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
baseball is a sport taught in the country __america	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
boards is a synonym for groups	1111	06-jul-2018	98.4
green_tea is an agricultural product produced in china	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
boris_johnson is the leader of the city central_london	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0