In this paper, we propose using metaheuristics- in particular, simulated annealing and the new D-Bees algorithm-to solve word sense disambiguation as an optimization problem within a knowledge-based lexical substitution system. We are the first to perform such an extrinsic evaluation of metaheuristics, for which we use two standard lexical substitution datasets, one English and one German. We find that D-Bees has robust performance for both languages, and performs better than simulated

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... , though both achieve good results. Moreover, the D-Bees-based lexical substitution system outperforms state-of-the-art systems on several evaluation metrics. We also show that D-Bees achieves competitive performance in lexical simplification, a variant of lexical substitution.