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
potato_wedges is a food	1111	06-jul-2018	98.3
unique_record is a political blog	1111	06-jul-2018	99.6
open_rear_door is an item often found in a hallway	1111	06-jul-2018	99.7
less_respect is an emotion	1111	06-jul-2018	96.0
vi_a is a geopolitical entity that is an organization	1111	06-jul-2018	94.9
steve001 is a person who belongs to the organization products	1112	24-jul-2018	96.9
william_verity is a person who has residence in the country us	1115	03-sep-2018	100.0
dozens is the number of people injured in the event blast_hits_bangkok	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
zeus is the father of apollo001	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
david_climer works for tennessean	1111	06-jul-2018	93.8