MADAWSD: Multi-Agent Debate Framework for Adversarial Word Sense Disambiguation
Kaiyuan Zhang, Qian Liu, Luyang Zhang, Chaoqun Zheng, Shuaimin Li, Bing Xu, Muyun Yang, Xinxiao Qiao, Wenpeng Lu
Abstract
Word sense disambiguation (WSD) is a fundamental yet challenging task in natural language processing. In recent years, the advent of large language models (LLMs) has led to significant advancements in regular WSD tasks. However, most existing LLMs face two major issues that hinder their performance in WSD. Firstly, these models are often prone to misclassifying the correct meaning of an ambiguous word when confronted with contexts containing adversarial information. Secondly, there is a lack of sufficient adversarial WSD datasets, which severely limits the development and evaluation of adversarial WSD systems. To address these gaps, we propose a novel Multi-Agent Debate framework for Adversarial Word Sense Disambiguation (MADAWSD). The MADAWSD framework simulates a real-world debate environment where multiple agent roles, namely, the Debater, Moderator, Consensus-seeker, and Judge, engage in discussions about ambiguous words in the context of adversarial information. Through a collaborative mechanism among these agents, it achieves accurate WSD. Additionally, a novel dataset for Chinese adversarial WSD has been constructed, focusing on improving and evaluating the performance of WSD models in the Chinese language. Extensive experiments on both English and Chinese adversarial WSD datasets demonstrate that MADAWSD can seamlessly integrate with existing LLMs and significantly enhance their performance, showcasing broad generality and outstanding effectiveness.- Anthology ID:
- 2025.emnlp-main.1134
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
- Month:
- November
- Year:
- 2025
- Address:
- Suzhou, China
- Editors:
- Christos Christodoulopoulos, Tanmoy Chakraborty, Carolyn Rose, Violet Peng
- Venue:
- EMNLP
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 22294–22313
- Language:
- URL:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-emnlp/2025.emnlp-main.1134/
- DOI:
- Cite (ACL):
- Kaiyuan Zhang, Qian Liu, Luyang Zhang, Chaoqun Zheng, Shuaimin Li, Bing Xu, Muyun Yang, Xinxiao Qiao, and Wenpeng Lu. 2025. MADAWSD: Multi-Agent Debate Framework for Adversarial Word Sense Disambiguation. In Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 22294–22313, Suzhou, China. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- MADAWSD: Multi-Agent Debate Framework for Adversarial Word Sense Disambiguation (Zhang et al., EMNLP 2025)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-emnlp/2025.emnlp-main.1134.pdf