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
dubliner_magazine is a publication	1111	06-jul-2018	90.7
noon_conference is a conference	1111	06-jul-2018	99.4
middle_school_language_arts_teacher is a political issue	1111	06-jul-2018	99.8
movie_deep_end_of_the_ocean is a movie	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
variable_stars is a geometric shape	1111	06-jul-2018	93.6
dan_pike is the leader of the city bellingham	1116	12-sep-2018	93.8
dc is taller than two_million_people	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
brewers participated in the event series	1112	24-jul-2018	100.0
harare is the capital city of the country zimbabwe	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
j__k__rowling wrote the book harry_potter	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0