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
year_1913 is a date	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
curly_tailed_lizard is a vertebrate	1112	24-jul-2018	100.0
arched_doorways is something found in or on buildings	1111	06-jul-2018	99.6
bulgarian_dialects is a language	1111	06-jul-2018	99.2
cibavision is a biotech company	1111	06-jul-2018	94.5
chicken is an animal that eats peanut	1115	03-sep-2018	100.0
basketball is a sport played in the venue conseco_fieldhouse	1115	03-sep-2018	100.0
young is a politician who holds the office of president	1113	15-aug-2018	99.8
honda is a specific automobile maker dealer in san_francisco	1112	24-jul-2018	98.4
tyrone_willingham works for notre_dame	1112	24-jul-2018	96.1