I didn't think much of it when I began writing my WordNet perl module last summer, but it looks like people are starting to recognize it as a useful thing.

I was given the task of doing some experimenting with query expansion using WordNet and hence needed code that would process WordNet queries quickly. I found the C code that comes with WordNet to be too slow for my purposes, so I wrote a perl module that loads the indexing tables into memory upon startup. Queries then consist of a few fseeks and small amounts of in-memory processing.

It makes me happy to see that it is being used to a real degree. Someone at UToronto recently sent me mail saying that he's using it for a 60-student class that he is teaching (!) :-)