Techniques are described herein for performing named entity disambiguation. According to an embodiment, a method includes receiving input text, extracting a first mention and a second mention from the input text, and selecting, from a knowledge graph, a plurality of first candidate vertices for the first mention and a plurality of second candidate vertices for the second mention. The present method also includes evaluating a score function that analyzes vertex embedding similarity between the plurality of first candidate vertices and the plurality of second candidate vertices. In response to evaluating and seeking to optimize the score function, the method performs selecting a first selected candidate vertex from the plurality of first candidate vertices and a second selected candidate vertex from the plurality of second candidate vertices. Further, the present method includes mapping a first entry from the knowledge graph to the first mention and mapping a second entry from the knowledge graph to the second mention. In this embodiment, the first entry corresponds to the first selected candidate vertex and the second entry corresponds to the second selected candidate.