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

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2206.13778 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.13778/

## Key facts

- Cited by 6 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 15 of its 28 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 28 Jun 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 15 of 15)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Sentence-BERT: Sentence Embeddings using Siamese BERT-Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.10084/) (2019)
- [BART: Denoising Sequence-to-Sequence Pre-training for Natural Language Generation, Translation, and Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.13461/) (2019)
- [GLM: General Language Model Pretraining with Autoregressive Blank Infilling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.10360/) (2021)
- [QA Dataset Explosion: A Taxonomy of NLP Resources for Question Answering and Reading Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.12708/) (2021)
- [CPT: A Pre-Trained Unbalanced Transformer for Both Chinese Language Understanding and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.05729/) (2021)
- [ChineseBERT: Chinese Pretraining Enhanced by Glyph and Pinyin Information](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.16038/) (2021)
- [RiddleSense: Reasoning about Riddle Questions Featuring Linguistic Creativity and Commonsense Knowledge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.00376/) (2021)
- [Generating Chinese Classical Poems with RNN Encoder-Decoder](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.01537/) (2016)
- [Cryptonite: A Cryptic Crossword Benchmark for Extreme Ambiguity in Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.01242/) (2021)
- [Chinese Character Decomposition for Neural MT with Multi-Word Expressions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.04497/) (2021)
- [BiRdQA: A Bilingual Dataset for Question Answering on Tricky Riddles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.11087/) (2021)
- [Component-Enhanced Chinese Character Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1508.06669/) (2015)
- [GlyphCRM: Bidirectional Encoder Representation for Chinese Character with its Glyph](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.00395/) (2021)
- [TransCouplet:Transformer based Chinese Couplet Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.01707/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [Puzzle Solving using Reasoning of Large Language Models: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.11291/) (2024)
- [VocalBench: Benchmarking the Vocal Conversational Abilities for Speech Interaction Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.15727/) (2025)
- [Adaptive Originality Filtering: Rejection Based Prompting and RiddleScore for Culturally Grounded Multilingual Riddle Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.18709/) (2025)
- [BengaliFig: A Low-Resource Challenge for Figurative and Culturally Grounded Reasoning in Bengali](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.20399/) (2025)
- [VocalBench-zh: Decomposing and Benchmarking the Speech Conversational Abilities in Mandarin Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.08230/) (2025)
- [Can LLMs Solve My Grandma's Riddle? Evaluating Multilingual Large Language Models on Reasoning Traditional Bangla Tricky Riddles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.20324/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

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.