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
hardyston_township is a county	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
university_of_phoenix_wichita_campus is a university	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
school_portraits is form of visual art	1111	06-jul-2018	99.0
al_qaida_of_jihad_in_iraq is a terrorist organization	1111	06-jul-2018	99.7
timegatecon is a convention	1111	06-jul-2018	99.9
invertebrates is a type of spiders	1111	06-jul-2018	90.6
mr__bush is a U.S. politician endorsed by the U.S. politician mccain	1112	24-jul-2018	96.9
marco_polo_airport is an airport in the city venice	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
morgan_freeman is an actor that worked with the director clint_eastwood	1115	03-sep-2018	100.0
new_bedford is a city located in the state or province massachusetts	1116	12-sep-2018	93.8