Die Rätselrevolution: Automated German Crossword Solving

Andrea Zugarini, Thomas Röthenbacher, Kai Klede, Marco Ernandes, Bjoern Eskofier, Dario Zanca

Abstract:

Crossword puzzles are popular word games played in various languages around the world, with diverse styles across different
countries. For this reason, automated crossword solvers designed for a language, may not work well on others. In this paper,
we extend Webcrow, an automatic crossword solver, to German, making it the first program for crossword solving in the
German language. To address the lack of large clue-answer crossword pairs data, Webcrow combines multiple modules,
known as experts, which retrieve potential answers from various resources, including the web, knowledge graphs, and
linguistic rules. The system is evaluated on a collection of crosswords from variegate sources, where it is able to solve
perfectly 67% of them. Additional analysis reveals that while our solver achieved commendable results, puzzles with poorly
constrained schemas and original clues still presented significant hurdles. These findings shed light on the complexity of the
crossword-solving problem and emphasize the need for future research to address and overcome these particular challenges
effectively.