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
culture_this_article is a legislative bill	1111	06-jul-2018	91.9
beef_wellington is a visualizable thing	1111	06-jul-2018	96.5
banff_2007_mountain_film_festival is a film festival	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
pocker_game_texas is a board game	1112	24-jul-2018	100.0
tarun_majumdar is a male	1111	06-jul-2018	90.4
ryan and matt_schaub are teammates	1111	06-jul-2018	93.8
n22 is the number of people killed in the event n18_shia_pilgrims_killed_in_pakistan	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
j__k__rowling contributed to the creative work harry_potter_and_the_chamber_of_secrets	1111	06-jul-2018	98.4
cbs58 is a TV station in the city downtown_milwaukee	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
w__bush represents the region __america	1116	12-sep-2018	99.6