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.

本研究通过扩展自动填字游戏求解器 WebCrow 2.0 到法语，采用多个模块从异构资源中检索候选答案，以应对缺乏大规模线索 - 答案数据的问题，并在两个挑战中将法国 WebCrow 的性能与人类进行了比较，结果证明其在速度和准确性方面超越了人类，从而证明了其在推广到新语言方面的能力。