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
warm_cherry is a fruit	1111	06-jul-2018	99.8
donald_york is a writer	1111	06-jul-2018	91.2
movie_the_haunting_of_molly_hartley is a movie	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
district_4_commissioner is a kind of office held by a politician	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
leg_step is a part of the body	1111	06-jul-2018	91.5
eliot was born in boston	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
laban is the father of pharaoh	1116	12-sep-2018	98.2
dell_inc terminated the employment of michael_dell	1113	15-aug-2018	100.0
children is an animal that can develop life_threatening	1113	15-aug-2018	95.2
magic is a sports team that played in playoffs	1111	06-jul-2018	99.2