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We introduce a novel approach to extract semantic relations (e.g., is-a and part-of relations) fromWikipedia articles. These relations are used to build up a large and up-to-date thesaurus providing background knowledge for tasks such as determining semantic ontology mappings. Our automatic approach uses a comprehensive set of semantic pat-terns, finite state machines and NLP techniques to extract millions of relations between concepts. An evaluation for different domains shows the high quality and effectiveness of the proposed approach. We also illustrate the value of the newly found relations for improving existing ontology mappings