According to an aspect, a pair of related entities that includes a first entity and a second entity is received. Distributional relations are detected between the first entity and the second entity. The detecting includes identifying two sets of entities in a corpus, the first set including the first entity and at least one other entity that is semantically similar to the first entity, and the second set including the second entity and at least one other entity that is semantically similar to the second entity. Semantic relations are detected between entities in the first set and entities in the second set. A relation classifier is trained using the pair of related entities and detected semantic relations. The relation classifier model is applied to a new pair of entities to determine a likelihood of a semantic relation between the entities in the new pair of entities.