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
mapping_software is a tool	1111	06-jul-2018	99.5
light_music is a record label	1111	06-jul-2018	91.2
difficult_programming_language is a programming language	1111	06-jul-2018	93.3
ipswich_town_centre is a skyscraper	1111	06-jul-2018	99.9
whole_potatoes is a fruit	1111	06-jul-2018	99.9
princes_street is a street in the city edinburgh	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
kiffin works for usc	1111	06-jul-2018	98.4
suburban_rail is a transportation system located in the city central_london	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
blue_jays is headquartered in the state or province new_york	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
google is taller than people	1116	12-sep-2018	96.9