This article presents a new model for word sense disambiguation formulated in terms of evolutionary game theory, where each word to be disambiguated is represented as a node on a graph whose edges represent word relations and senses are represented as classes. The words simultaneously update their class membership preferences according to the senses that neighboring words are likely to choose. We use distributional information to weigh the influence that each word has on the decisions of the others and semantic similarity information to measure the strength of compatibility among the choices. With this information we can formulate the word sense disambiguation problem as a constraint satisfaction problem and solve it using tools derived from game theory, maintaining the textual coherence. The model is based on two ideas: Similar words should be assigned to similar classes and the meaning of a word does not depend on all the words in a text but just on some of them. The article provides an in-depth motivation of the idea of modeling the word sense disambiguation problem in terms of game theory, which is illustrated by an example. The conclusion presents an extensive analysis on the combination of similarity measures to use in the framework and a comparison with state-of-the-art systems. The results show that our model outperforms state-of-the-art algorithms and can be applied to different tasks and in different scenarios.
@cite_95: 
@cite_93: This paper generalizes the Adapted Lesk Algorithm of Banerjee and Pedersen (2002) to a method of word sense disambiguation based on semantic relatedness. This is possible since Lesk's original algorithm (1986) is based on gloss overlaps which can be viewed as a measure of semantic relatedness. We evaluate a variety of measures of semantic relatedness when applied to word sense disambiguation by carrying out experiments using the English lexical sample data of SENSEVAL-2. We find that the gloss overlaps of Adapted Lesk and the semantic distance measure of Jiang and Conrath (1997) result in the highest accuracy.
@cite_74: This paper presents a new measure of semantic similarity in an IS-A taxonomy, based on the notion of information content. Experimental evaluation suggests that the measure performs encouragingly well (a correlation of r = 0.79 with a benchmark set of human similarity judgments, with an upper bound of r = 0.90 for human subjects performing the same task), and significantly better than the traditional edge counting approach (r = 0.66).
Other unsupervised and semi-supervised approaches, instead of computing the prevalent sense of a word, try to identify the actual sense of a word in a determined phrase, exploiting the information derived from its context. This is the case of traditional algorithms, which exploit the pairwise semantic similarity among a target word and the words in its context @cite_95 @cite_74 @cite_93 . Our work could be considered as a continuation of this tradition, which tries to identify the intended meaning of a word given its context, using a new approach for the computation of the sense combinations.