This paper presents the first Arabic crossword puzzle generator driven by advanced AI technology. Leveraging cutting-edge large language models including GPT4, GPT3-Davinci, GPT3-Curie, GPT3-Babbage, GPT3-Ada, and BERT, the system generates distinctive and challenging clues. Based on a dataset comprising over 50,000 clue-answer pairs, the generator employs fine-tuning, few/zero-shot learning strategies, and rigorous quality-checking protocols to enforce the generation of high-quality clue-answer pairs. Importantly, educational crosswords contribute to enhancing memory, expanding vocabulary, and promoting problem-solving skills, thereby augmenting the learning experience through a fun and engaging approach, reshaping the landscape of traditional learning methods. The overall system can be exploited as a powerful educational tool that amalgamates AI and innovative learning techniques, heralding a transformative era for Arabic crossword puzzles and the intersection of technology and education.

Educational crosswords offer numerous benefits for students, including increased engagement, improved understanding, critical thinking, and memory retention. Creating high-quality educational crosswords can be challenging, but recent advances in natural language processing and machine learning have made it possible to use language models to generate nice wordplays. The exploitation of cutting-edge language models like GPT3-DaVinci, GPT3-Curie, GPT3-Babbage, GPT3-Ada, and BERT-uncased has led to the development of a comprehensive system for generating and verifying crossword clues. A large dataset of clue-answer pairs was compiled to fine-tune the models in a supervised manner to generate original and challenging clues from a given keyword. On the other hand, for generating crossword clues from a given text, Zero/Few-shot learning techniques were used to extract clues from the input text, adding variety and creativity to the puzzles. We employed the fine-tuned model to generate data and labeled the acceptability of clue-answer parts with human supervision. To ensure quality, we developed a classifier by fine-tuning existing language models on the labeled dataset. Conversely, to assess the quality of clues generated from the given text using zero/few-shot learning, we employed a zero-shot learning approach to check the quality of generated clues. The results of the evaluation have been very promising, demonstrating the effectiveness of the approach in creating high-standard educational crosswords that offer students engaging and rewarding learning experiences.

Crosswords are very popular and represent a useful domain of investigation for modern artificial intelligence. In contrast to solving other celebrated games (such as chess), cracking crosswords requires a paradigm shift towards the ability to handle tasks for which humans require extensive semantic knowledge. This article introduces WebCrow, an automatic crossword solver in which the needed knowledge is mined from the web: clues are solved primarily by accessing the web through search engines and applying natural language processing techniques. In competitions at the European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (ECAI) in 2006 and other conferences this web-based approach enabled WebCrow to outperform its human challengers. Just as chess was once called “the Drosophila of artificial intelligence,” we believe that crossword systems can be useful Drosophila of web-based agents.