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
awful_picture is form of visual art	1111	06-jul-2018	99.2
craig_smith is a Mexican person	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
albert_b__douglas is a monarch	1111	06-jul-2018	98.0
class_ports is a machine-learning conference	1111	06-jul-2018	95.9
shawn_everett is a North American person	1111	06-jul-2018	91.3
usa is a country also known as yugoslav_federation	1111	06-jul-2018	93.8
la is a city also known as los_angeles_ca	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
christian is a person who graduated from the university state_university	1112	24-jul-2018	99.2
mccain is a U.S. politician endorsed by the U.S. politician bob_barr	1112	24-jul-2018	98.4
bed is often found in northeast_bedroom	1115	03-sep-2018	93.8