English

Semantic, Orthographic, and Phonological Biases in Humans' Wordle Gameplay

Computation and Language 2025-11-14 v2

Abstract

We show that human players' gameplay in the game of Wordle is influenced by the semantics, orthography, and phonology of the player's previous guesses. We compare actual human players' guesses with near-optimal guesses using NLP techniques. We study human language use in the constrained environment of Wordle, which is situated between natural language use and the artificial word association task

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2411.18634,
  title  = {Semantic, Orthographic, and Phonological Biases in Humans' Wordle Gameplay},
  author = {Jiadong Liang and Adam Kabbara and Jiaying Liu and Ronaldo Luo and Kina Kim and Michael Guerzhoy},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2411.18634},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

Findings of the ACL: IJCNLP-AACL 2025 (accepted)