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.