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
assistant_principal_athletic_director is a kind of office held by a politician	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
buffalo_campground is a place to ski	1111	06-jul-2018	92.5
supplements_comments is software used by machine-learning scientists	1112	24-jul-2018	99.3
james_anagnoson is a professor	1111	06-jul-2018	91.2
wichita_city is a train station	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
bernhard_schlink held the position of author	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
southern_cascade is a mountain in the state or province california	1116	12-sep-2018	93.8
crustaceans is a type of shrimp	1113	15-aug-2018	97.4
eve is the mother of yahweh	1114	25-aug-2018	99.2
the country guyana uses the currency dollars	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0