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.
Supported by expert.ai, https://www.expert.ai/.
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Acknowledgements
This research owes its accomplishment to the generous collaboration of esteemed French crossword authors, Serge Prasil and Michel Labeaume. The University of Siena, expert.ai, and the 3IA Côte d’Azur Investment in the Future projects administered by the National Research Agency (ANR), under the reference number ANR-19-P3IA-0002, provided invaluable support for this endeavor
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Angelini, G. et al. (2024). The WebCrow French Crossword Solver. In: Clayton, M., Passacantando, M., Sanguineti, M. (eds) Intelligent Technologies for Interactive Entertainment. INTETAIN 2023. Lecture Notes of the Institute for Computer Sciences, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering, vol 560. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-55722-4_14
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