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
center_purchases is a sports team position	1111	06-jul-2018	98.9
florida_baptist_theological_college_hollywood is a train station	1111	06-jul-2018	99.7
giant_salamanders is an amphibian	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
campus_drive is a highway	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
mosaic_bathrooms is an office building room	1111	06-jul-2018	97.8
los_angeles_ca is a city also known as la	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
clark plays the athletic team position left_field	1114	25-aug-2018	93.8
mbta is a transportation system located in the city boston	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
kbcw is a company that has an office in the city san_francisco	1112	24-jul-2018	100.0
lobster is a type of crustaceans	1113	15-aug-2018	96.9