CC-Riddle: A Question Answering Dataset of Chinese Character Riddles

The Chinese character riddle is a unique form of cultural entertainment specific to the Chinese language. It typically comprises two parts: the riddle description and the solution. The solution to the riddle is a single character, while the riddle description primarily describes the glyph of the solution, occasionally supplemented with its explanation and pronunciation. Solving Chinese character riddles is a challenging task that demands understanding of character glyph, general knowledge, and a grasp of figurative language. In this paper, we construct a Chinese Character riddle dataset named CC-Riddle, which covers the majority of common simplified Chinese characters. The construction process is a combination of web crawling, language model generation and manual filtering. In generation stage, we input the Chinese phonetic alphabet, glyph and meaning of the solution character into the generation model, which then produces multiple riddle descriptions. The generated riddles are then manually filtered and the final CC-Riddle dataset is composed of both human-written riddles and these filtered, generated riddles. In order to assess the performance of language models on the task of solving character riddles, we use retrieval-based, generative and multiple-choice QA strategies to test three language models: BERT, ChatGPT and ChatGLM. The test results reveal that current language models still struggle to solve Chinese character riddles. CC-Riddle is publicly available at urlhttps://github.com/pku0xff/CC-Riddle.