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
date_paste is a visualizable thing	1111	06-jul-2018	97.0
singing_frogs_farm is a farm	1111	06-jul-2018	99.8
president_the_last_time is a profession	1111	06-jul-2018	90.0
primary_auditory_area is a kind of brain tissue	1111	06-jul-2018	99.0
peruvian_coffee is a coffee drink	1112	24-jul-2018	95.3
industrial___commercial_bank is a company that has an office in the country china	1114	25-aug-2018	93.8
predators is an animal that preys on spiders	1111	06-jul-2018	99.2
gynecology is an academic program at the university college	1113	15-aug-2018	100.0
commission_junction_and_linkshare is an organization known by the acronym commission_junction	1114	25-aug-2018	100.0
president_elect_obama is a U.S. politician endorsed by the U.S. politician biden	1112	24-jul-2018	100.0