WebCrow: A Web-Based System for Crossword Solving

Book One

Volume

Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 20

Semantic Web, Information Retrieval, and Extraction

Language games represent one of the most fascinating challenges of research in artificial intelligence. In this paper we give an overview of WebCrow, a system that tackles crosswords using the Web as a knowledge base. This appears to be a novel approach with respect to the available literature. It is also the first solver for non- English crosswords and it has been designed to be potentially multilingual. Although WebCrow has been implemented only in a preliminary version, it already displays very interesting results reaching the performance of a human beginner: crosswords that are "easy" for expert humans are solved, within competition time limits, with 80 percent of correct words and over 90 percent of correct letters.