# The WebCrow French Crossword Solver

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.15626 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.15626/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 6 of its 22 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 27 Nov 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Distributed Representations of Words and Phrases and their Compositionality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1310.4546/) (2013)
- [Universal Sentence Encoder](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.11175/) (2018)
- [Advances in Pre-Training Distributed Word Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.09405/) (2017)
- [Automated Crossword Solving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.09665/) (2022)
- [Dr.Fill: Crosswords and an Implemented Solver for Singly Weighted CSPs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1401.4597/) (2014)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Non Verbis, Sed Rebus: Large Language Models are Weak Solvers of Italian Rebuses](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.00584/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

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.