Decrypting Cryptic Crosswords: Semantically Complex Wordplay Puzzles as a Target for NLP

Cryptic crosswords, the dominant crossword variety in the UK, are a promising target for advancing NLP systems that seek to process semantically complex, highly compositional language. Cryptic clues read like fluent natural language but are adversarially composed of two parts: a definition and a wordplay cipher requiring character-level manipulations. Expert humans use creative intelligence to solve cryptics, flexibly combining linguistic, world, and domain knowledge. In this paper, we make two main contributions. First, we present a dataset of cryptic clues as a challenging new benchmark for NLP systems that seek to process compositional language in more creative, human-like ways.