Preface
Cryptic crosswords are wordplay puzzles. In these puzzles clues read like phrases or sentences on the surface but always have a secondary instruction that leads to the morphological construction of the solution.
I have written at length about this topic in my undergraduate dissertation, which I was awarded a First class mark on. Cryptic crosswords are challenging for most trained humans, let alone machines. I show that these puzzles remain a challenge for transformer language models by training a variety of models under differential conditions. I also present a novel dataset of clues annotated with explanations.
This is a fascinating area and I'm sure that more will be done on this domain in the near future.
The paper
A recent compilation of my paper is linked here:
For discussion or questions email me.