A method and 
system for automatically extracting relations between concepts included in electronic text is described. Aspects the exemplary embodiment include a 
semantic network comprising a plurality of lemmas that are grouped into synsets representing concepts, each of the synsets having a corresponding sense, and a plurality of links connected between the synsets that represent semantic relations between the synsets. The 
semantic network further includes 
semantic information comprising at least one of: 1) an expanded set of 
semantic relation links representing: hierarchical semantic relations, synset / corpus semantic relations 
verb / subject semantic relations, 
verb / direct object semantic relations, and 
fine grain / coarse grain 
semantic relationship; 2) a hierarchical category tree having a plurality of categories, wherein each of the categories contains a group of one or more synsets and a set of attributes, wherein the set of attributes of each of the categories are associated with each of the synsets in the respective category; and 3) a plurality of domains, wherein one or more of the domains is associated with at least a portion of the synsets, wherein each domain adds information regarding a linguistic context in which the corresponding synset is used in a language. A linguistic engine uses the 
semantic network to performing semantic disambiguation on the electronic text using one or more of the expanded set of 
semantic relation links, the hierarchical category tree, and the plurality of domains to assign a respective one of the senses to elements in the electronic text independently from contextual reference.