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
coyote_hill_farm is a farm	1111	06-jul-2018	99.9
n42_pounds is a currency	1111	06-jul-2018	99.9
business__ is a physical characteristic	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
inconvenience_engineering is an area of study within the field of machine learning	1111	06-jul-2018	99.9
glacier_bay_national_monument is a monument	1111	06-jul-2018	99.9
irish_hills is a lake in the state or province michigan	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
barack is a U.S. politician who holds the office of u_s__presidency	1111	06-jul-2018	93.8
philip is a musician who plays the guitar	1115	03-sep-2018	99.8
hines_ward plays the athletic team position player	1113	15-aug-2018	93.8
greg_norman_and_ted_robinson is an athlete who wins british_open	1114	25-aug-2018	100.0