US Patent 7630981 Method and system for learning ontological relations from documents

Embodiments of an ontological determination method for use in natural language processing applications are described. In one embodiment, shallow lexico-syntactic patterns are applied to identify relations by extracting term features to distinguish relation terms from non-relation terms, identifying coordinate relations for every adjacent terms; identifying short-distance ontological (e.g., hypernym or part-whole relations) for other adjacent terms based on term features and lexico-syntactic patterns; and then inferring long-distance hypernym and part-whole relations based on the identified coordinate relations and the short-distance relations.