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
led_light_shower_head is an item often found in a bathroom	1111	06-jul-2018	99.7
wqad is a TV station	1111	06-jul-2018	99.7
mount_gec is a mountain	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
pantagraph_newspaper is a publication	1111	06-jul-2018	91.8
college_station_arkansas is a beach	1111	06-jul-2018	96.0
peppers is an agricultural product produced in __america	1116	12-sep-2018	99.2
black_widow_spiders is a synonym for spiders	1111	06-jul-2018	98.4
president_obama is a U.S. politician who holds the office of secretary	1112	24-jul-2018	96.9
physiological is an academic program at the university state_university	1113	15-aug-2018	93.8
spiders is a type of animals	1112	24-jul-2018	100.0