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
foolscapcon is a convention	1111	06-jul-2018	99.9
summer_olympics_games is an instance of the olympics	1111	06-jul-2018	99.9
national_research_council_board is a professional organization	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
great_western_main_line is a transportation system	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
iron_age_safety_shoes is a kind of clothing	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
the home stadium of brent_sopel is wrigley_field	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
morton_plant is a hospital in the city clearwater	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
capital is a city also known as washington_d_c_	1113	15-aug-2018	93.8
whdh is headquartered in the city boston	1116	12-sep-2018	99.2
sammy_sosa is an athlete also known as jorge_posada	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0