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
poker_free_poker_texas is a board game	1112	24-jul-2018	100.0
comment_every_year is software used by machine-learning scientists	1111	06-jul-2018	99.3
batesville_guard is a newspaper	1111	06-jul-2018	97.9
same_requirements is a political issue	1111	06-jul-2018	95.3
battle_of_tai_erzhuang is a military conflict	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
hsbc is a company that has an office in the country hong_kong	1114	25-aug-2018	96.9
barack_obama represents the region harvard_law_review	1114	25-aug-2018	100.0
rolls_royce was responsible for rolls_royce_launches_ghost_series_ii	1114	25-aug-2018	100.0
the companies media and youtube compete with eachother	1111	06-jul-2018	98.4
department is an organization also known as service	1112	24-jul-2018	100.0