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
actors_and_artists_of_america is a trade union	1112	24-jul-2018	90.2
mgwirizano_coalition is a political party	1111	06-jul-2018	92.7
manhattan_creek is a river	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
exeter_avenue is a street	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
ksyx is a radio station	1111	06-jul-2018	98.2
marie has citizenship in the country france_france	1114	25-aug-2018	100.0
harvard is a city also known as dc	1113	15-aug-2018	93.8
john_carpenter directed the movie the_thing	1115	03-sep-2018	99.2
volkswagen terminated the employment of ferdinand_piech	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
abu_musab_al_zarqawi was born in the country jordan	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0