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.

Crossword puzzles aren't always easy to solve even for the most avid human fans, and they also remain one of the most challenging areas in artificial intelligence. Now, the University of Siena in Italy and expert.ai WebCrow 2.0 uses natural language processing technology to understand a puzzle's clues like a human player would. That's trickier than it sounds, seeing as the same word could mean totally different things based on context, and crossword puzzle clues could contain a play on words. The answer for the clue "liquid that does not stick," for instance, is "scotch," which alludes to Scotch tape. Plus, the AI derives information from previously solved puzzles and its self-updating web knowledge to find the correct answer.