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
food_bowl is an item found in the kitchen	1111	06-jul-2018	99.0
richard_ramirez is a criminal	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
sri_lankan_workers is a trade union	1111	06-jul-2018	91.7
cox_newspapers is a blog	1111	06-jul-2018	97.2
n5_2_percentage_points is a machine-learning algorithm	1111	06-jul-2018	99.7
michelle_obama and barack_obama are family members	1111	06-jul-2018	93.8
center is a role for players of hockey	1111	06-jul-2018	93.8
states is a state or province located in the geopolitical location israel	1114	25-aug-2018	100.0
bush_administration has been charged with war_crimes	1115	03-sep-2018	99.2
anderson_varejao plays in the league nba	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0