Webcrow: a web-based crosswords solver

Authors:
Giovanni Angelini;Marco Ernandes;Marco Gori
Affiliations:
Dipartimento di Ingegneria dell'Informazione, Siena, Italy;Dipartimento di Ingegneria dell'Informazione, Siena, Italy;Dipartimento di Ingegneria dell'Informazione, Siena, Italy
Venue:
INTETAIN'05 Proceedings of the First international conference on Intelligent Technologies for Interactive Entertainment
Year:
2005

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Abstract

Webcrow is a software system whose aim is to solve crosswords. Problems of like solving crosswords have been informally defined as AI-Complete and are extremely challenging for machines. Webcrow represents the first solver for Italian crosswords and the first system that tackles this language game using the Web as knowledge base. Currently, Webcrow is competitive against an average crossword player. Crosswords that are “easy” for expert humans (i.e. crosswords from the cover pages of La Settimana Enigmistica) are solved, in a 15 minutes time limit, with 80% of correct words and over 90% of correct letters. Webcrow well performs on crosswords that are designed for experts and, in general, it outperforms an average undergraduate student on this kind of crosswords.