Useful References

G. Angelini, M. Ernandes, and M. Gori. Solving italian crosswords using the web. In International Conference of the Italian Association for Artificial Intelligence, 2005.

G. Barlacchi, M. Nicosia, and A. Moschitti. A retrieval model for automatic resolution of crossword puzzles in italian language. In Proceedings of the First Italian Conference on Computational Linguistics CLiC-it 2014 & and of the Fourth International Workshop EVALITA 2014: 9-11 December 2014, Pisa, pages 33–37. Pisa University Press, 2014.

Ciaccio C., Sarti G., Miaschi A., Dell'Orletta F. Crossword Space: Latent Manifold Learning for Italian Crosswords and Beyond. In Proceedings of the 11th Italian Conference on Computational Linguistics (CLiC-it 2025), Cagliari, Italy, September 2025 (upcoming).

L. de Moura and N. Bjørner. Z3: An efficient smt solver. In C. R. Ramakrishnan and J. Rehof, editors, Tools and Algorithms for the Construction and Analysis of Systems, pages 337–340, Berlin, Heidelberg, 2008. Springer Berlin Heidelberg.

M. Ernandes, G. Angelini, and M. Gori. Webcrow: A web-based system for crossword solving. In AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 2005.

M. L. Ginsberg. Dr. fill: Crosswords and an implemented solver for singly weighted csps. Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research, 42:851–886, 2011.

S. Kulshreshtha, O. Kovaleva, N. Shivagunde, and A. Rumshisky. Down and across: Introducing crossword-solving as a new NLP benchmark. In S. Muresan, P. Nakov, and A. Villavicencio, editors, Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 2648–2659, Dublin, Ireland, May 2022. Association for Computational Linguistics.

A. Moschitti, M. Nicosia, and G. Barlacchi. SACRY: Syntax-based automatic crossword puzzle resolution sYstem. In H.-H. Chen and K. Markert, editors, Proceedings of ACL-IJCNLP 2015 System Demonstrations, pages 79–84, Beijing, China, July 2015. Association for Computational Linguistics and The Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing.

J. Rozner, C. Potts, and K. Mahowald. Decrypting cryptic crosswords: Semantically complex wordplay puzzles as a target for nlp. In M. Ranzato, A. Beygelzimer, Y. Dauphin, P. Liang, and J. W. Vaughan, editors, Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, volume 34, pages 11409–11421. Curran Associates, Inc., 2021.

A. Sadallah, D. Kotova, and E. Kochmar. What makes cryptic crosswords challenging for LLMs? In O. Rambow, L. Wanner, M. Apidianaki, H. Al-Khalifa, B. D. Eugenio, and S. Schockaert, editors, Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics, pages 5102–5114, Abu Dhabi, UAE, Jan. 2025. Association for Computational Linguistics.

S. Saha, S. Chakraborty, S. Saha, and U. Garain. Language models are crossword solvers. In L. Chiruzzo, A. Ritter, and L. Wang, editors, Proceedings of the 2025 Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 2074–2090, Albuquerque, New Mexico, Apr. 2025. Association for Computational Linguistics.

G. Sarti, T. Caselli, A. Bisazza, and M. Nissim. EurekaRebus - verbalized rebus solving with LLMs: A CALAMITA challenge. In F. Dell’Orletta, A. Lenci, S. Montemagni, and R. Sprugnoli, editors, Proceedings of the 10th Italian Conference on Computational Linguistics (CLiC-it 2024), pages 1202–1208, Pisa, Italy, Dec. 2024. CEUR Workshop Proceedings.

G. Sarti, T. Caselli, M. Nissim, and A. Bisazza. Non verbis, sed rebus: Large language models are weak solvers of Italian rebuses. In F. Dell’Orletta, A. Lenci, S. Montemagni, and R. Sprugnoli, editors, Proceedings of the 10th Italian Conference on Computational Linguistics (CLiC-it 2024), pages 888–897, Pisa, Italy, Dec. 2024. CEUR Workshop Proceedings.

E. Wallace, N. Tomlin, A. Xu, K. Yang, E. Pathak, M. Ginsberg, and D. Klein. Automated crossword solving. In S. Muresan, P. Nakov, and A. Villavicencio, editors, Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 3073–3085, Dublin, Ireland, May 2022. Association for Computational Linguistics.

K. Zeinalipour, T. Iaquinta, A. Zanollo, G. Angelini, L. Rigutini, M. Maggini, and M. Gori. Italian crossword generator: Enhancing education through interactive word puzzles. In Proceedings of the 9th Italian Conference on Computational Linguistics (CLiC-it 2023), 2023.