English

The WebCrow French Crossword Solver

Computation and Language 2023-12-12 v2

Abstract

Crossword puzzles are one of the most popular word games, played in different languages all across the world, where riddle style can vary significantly from one country to another. Automated crossword resolution is challenging, and typical solvers rely on large databases of previously solved crosswords. In this work, we extend WebCrow 2.0, an automatic crossword solver, to French, making it the first program for crossword solving in the French language. To cope with the lack of a large repository of clue-answer crossword data, WebCrow 2.0 exploits multiple modules, called experts, that retrieve candidate answers from heterogeneous resources, such as the web, knowledge graphs, and linguistic rules. We compared WebCrow's performance against humans in two different challenges. Despite the limited amount of past crosswords, French WebCrow was competitive, actually outperforming humans in terms of speed and accuracy, thus proving its capabilities to generalize to new languages.

Cite

@article{arxiv.2311.15626,
  title  = {The WebCrow French Crossword Solver},
  author = {Giovanni Angelini and Marco Ernandes and Tommaso laquinta and Caroline Stehlé and Fanny Simões and Kamyar Zeinalipour and Andrea Zugarini and Marco Gori},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2311.15626},
  year   = {2023}
}

Comments

Accepted Paper for EAI Intetain 2023 - 14th EAI International Conference on Intelligent Technologies for Interactive Entertainment

R2 v1 2026-06-28T13:32:23.475Z