This paper describes the extraction from Wikipedia of lexical reference rules, identifying references to term meanings triggered by other terms. We present extraction methods geared to cover the broad range of the lexical reference relation and analyze them extensively. Most extraction methods yield high precision levels, and our rule-base is shown to perform better than other automatically constructed baselines in a couple of lexical expansion and matching tasks. Our rule-base yields comparable performance to WordNet while providing largely complementary information. .
