Research Article
The WebCrow French Crossword Solver
@INPROCEEDINGS{10.1007/978-3-031-55722-4_14, author={Giovanni Angelini and Marco Ernandes and Tommaso Iaquinta and Caroline Stehl\^{e} and Fanny Sim\"{o}es and Kamyar Zeinalipour and Andrea Zugarini and Marco Gori}, title={The WebCrow French Crossword Solver}, proceedings={Intelligent Technologies for Interactive Entertainment. 14th EAI International Conference, INTETAIN 2023, Lucca, Italy, November 27, 2023, Proceedings}, proceedings_a={INTETAIN}, year={2024}, month={3}, keywords={Natural Language Processing Crossword Crossword Solver Artificial intelligence Linguistic Puzzles Probabilistic Constraint Satisfaction}, doi={10.1007/978-3-031-55722-4_14} }- Giovanni Angelini
Marco Ernandes
Tommaso Iaquinta
Caroline Stehlé
Fanny Simões
Kamyar Zeinalipour
Andrea Zugarini
Marco Gori
Year: 2024
The WebCrow French Crossword Solver
INTETAIN
Springer
DOI: 10.1007/978-3-031-55722-4_14
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.
