Modern models of relation extraction for tasks like ACE are based on supervised learning of relations from small hand-labeled corpora. We investigate an alternative paradigm that does not require labeled corpora, avoiding the domain dependence of ACEstyle algorithms, and allowing the use of corpora of any size. Our experiments use Freebase, a large semantic database of several thousand relations, to provide distant supervision. For each pair of entities that appears in some Freebase relation, we find all sentences containing those entities in a large unlabeled corpus and extract textual features to train a relation classifier. .