1. A method of learning ontological relations in a document comprising: extracting term features from noun-phrases in the document; generating short-distance patterns for both coordinate terms and ontological relations in the document; generalizing the short-distance patterns for both the coordinate terms and the ontological relations; identifying short-distance coordinate relations and ontological relations respectively from the generalized short-distance coordinate terms and short-distance ontological relations; and deriving long-distance ontological relations from the identified short-distance coordinate relations and ontological relations.