Die Rätselrevolution: Automated German Crossword Solving

Zugarini A, Röthenbacher T, Klede K, Ernandes M, Eskofier B, Zanca D (2023)

Publication Language: English

Publication Type: Conference contribution, Original article

Publication year: 2023

Conference Proceedings Title: Proceedings of the 9th Italian Conference on Computational Linguistics

Event location: Venice IT

URI: https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-3596/paper54.pdf

Open Access Link: https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-3596/paper54.pdf

Abstract

Crossword puzzles are popular word games played in various languages around the world, with diverse styles across different countries. For this reason, automated crossword solvers designed for a language, may not work well on others. In this paper, we extend Webcrow, an automatic crossword solver, to German, making it the first program for crossword solving in the German language. To address the lack of large clue-answer crossword pairs data, Webcrow combines multiple modules, known as experts, which retrieve potential answers from various resources, including the web, knowledge graphs, and linguistic rules. The system is evaluated on a collection of crosswords from various sources, where it is able to solve perfectly 67% of them. Additional analysis reveals that while our solver achieved commendable results, puzzles with poorly constrained schemas and original clues still presented significant hurdles. These findings shed light on the complexity of the crossword-solving problem and emphasize the need for future research to address and overcome these particular challenges effectively.

Authors with CRIS profile

Kai Klede Machine Learning and Data Analytics Lab Björn Eskofier Machine Learning and Data Analytics Lab Dario Zanca Machine Learning and Data Analytics Lab

Involved external institutions

expert.ai SpA IT Italy (IT)

How to cite

APA:

Zugarini, A., Röthenbacher, T., Klede, K., Ernandes, M., Eskofier, B., & Zanca, D. (2023). Die Rätselrevolution: Automated German Crossword Solving. In Federico Boschetti, Gianluca E. Lebani, Bernardo Magnini, Nicole Novielli (Eds.), Proceedings of the 9th Italian Conference on Computational Linguistics. Venice, IT.

MLA:

Zugarini, Andrea, et al. "Die Rätselrevolution: Automated German Crossword Solving." Proceedings of the CLiC-it 2023 - Italian Conference on Computational Linguistics, Venice Ed. Federico Boschetti, Gianluca E. Lebani, Bernardo Magnini, Nicole Novielli, 2023.

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