1. A computer-implemented method of learning ontological relations in a document stored in a computer memory, the method executed in a processor-based platform and comprising: extracting terms from noun-phrases in the document, wherein the terms are included in word sequences comprising the noun-phrases; generating short-distance patterns for both coordinate terms and ontological relations in the document, wherein short-distance patterns comprise terms separated by at most one additional term, and the coordinate terms comprise terms that share the same hypernym/holonym parent; generalizing the short-distance patterns for both the coordinate terms and the ontological relations; identifying short-distance coordinate relations and ontological relations by grouping the short-distance patterns by verbs or prepositions, extracting the longest common substring within each group of pattern strings, and deriving generalized patterns for every verb or preposition; 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, wherein the long-distance ontological relations comprise ontological relations between terms separated by at least two additional terms.