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
indicator_plant is a plant	1111	06-jul-2018	99.9
tropics_magazines is a kind of media	1111	06-jul-2018	99.0
whole_bottle is a visualizable object	1111	06-jul-2018	98.7
jacqueline_thompson is a CEO	1111	06-jul-2018	91.2
united_kingdom___rutland is a country	1111	06-jul-2018	96.9
crab_spiders is an arthropod as well as spiders also is	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
indinavir_sulfate is a drug worked on by merck	1114	25-aug-2018	100.0
t__h__white contributed to the creative work the_once_and_future_king	1112	24-jul-2018	100.0
china is a country also known as argentina	1111	06-jul-2018	93.8
european_countries is a generalization of sweden	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0