Séminaire Donnees et APprentissage Artificiel
WebCrow and the man-machine crossword challenge
Wednesday, December 10, 2008Marco Gori (University of Siena)
Originally, it was just an assignment in my course of artificial intelligence. The assignment was supposed to focus on the problem of allocating a set of words onto a given crossword scheme. After a while, it became something more exciting: solve crosswords from clues exactly like humans do using pencil and rubber on the train or near the fireplace. Nearly four years ago, we launched the man-machine crossword challenge, that resembles somehow the celebrated chess man-machine competition. The software is called WebCrow (http://webcrow.dii.unisi.it/webpage/index.html), since it makes significant use of the Web to answer encyclopedic clues thanks to a tight interaction with Google. On August the 31th, 2006, WebCrow thrashed human challengers during the ECAI-06 international conference. However, scientists participating to AI conferences are not necessarily crossword masters and, unfortunately, WebCrow is still unable to face truly crossword masters. In this talk, I describe the project and point out which technical solutions that might open the doors for transforming a nice software that solves crosswords to a crossword master.
More details here …
Thomas.Baerecke (at) nulllip6.fr