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
nervous_system_cells is a type of biological cell	1111	06-jul-2018	97.8
kathleen_flinn is a chef	1111	06-jul-2018	99.9
wnwc is a radio station	1111	06-jul-2018	96.9
twenty_eight_students is a victim	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
burlington_county_north_jersey is a county	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
chen is a person who belongs to the organization youtube	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
equipment is a subpart of hot_water	1111	06-jul-2018	96.9
us_ is a country also known as china	1111	06-jul-2018	93.8
lisbon is the capital city of the country portugal	1116	12-sep-2018	96.9
hartford_connecticut is the capital city of the state or province connecticut	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0