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
louisiana_state_medical_center is a hospital	1111	06-jul-2018	90.1
french_and_or_dutch is an ethnic group	1111	06-jul-2018	95.8
days_inn_valdosta is a hotel	1111	06-jul-2018	94.5
sikinos is a visualizable scene	1111	06-jul-2018	99.5
battle_of_sch_ngrabern is a military conflict	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
portuguese is the language of the country east_timor	1114	25-aug-2018	99.2
green_foliage has color purple	1114	25-aug-2018	96.9
spiders is called recluse_spider	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
medrol is a drug having the side effect side_effects	1114	25-aug-2018	93.8
dan is a person who graduated from the university michigan_state_university	1113	15-aug-2018	100.0