• Corpus ID: 233296318

Decrypting Cryptic Crosswords: Semantically Complex Wordplay Puzzles as a Target for NLP

@article{Rozner2021DecryptingCC,
  title={Decrypting Cryptic Crosswords: Semantically Complex Wordplay Puzzles as a Target for NLP},
  author={Josh Rozner and Christopher Potts and Kyle Mahowald},
  journal={ArXiv},
  year={2021},
  volume={abs/2104.08620}
}
Cryptic crosswords, the dominant crossword variety in the UK, are a promising target for advancing NLP systems that seek to process semantically complex, highly compositional language. Cryptic clues read like fluent natural language but are adversarially composed of two parts: a definition and a wordplay cipher requiring character-level manipulations. Expert humans use creative intelligence to solve cryptics, flexibly combining linguistic, world, and domain knowledge. In this paper, we make two… 
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