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
weather_quality is a character trait	1111	06-jul-2018	99.7
my_love_is_like_a_red_red_rose is a song	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
flash_lighting is a perception event	1111	06-jul-2018	97.2
district_4_representative is a kind of office held by a politician	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
small_intestine is a part of the body	1111	06-jul-2018	95.3
fortis is a bank that bought abn_amro	1114	25-aug-2018	100.0
orhan_pamuk was born in istanbul	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
eden and eve are family members	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
kdvs is a radio station in the city davis	1116	12-sep-2018	93.8
widow is a synonym for spiders	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0