The WebCrow French Crossword Solver
This work addresses the challenge of crossword solving for French language enthusiasts, but it is incremental as it extends an existing solver to a new language.
The authors tackled the problem of automated crossword solving in French, a language lacking large clue-answer databases, by extending WebCrow 2.0 to use multiple expert modules for answer retrieval. The result was that French WebCrow outperformed humans in speed and accuracy in two challenges, demonstrating its generalization capabilities.
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.