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A Reasoning-Based Approach to Cryptic Crossword Clue Solving

Conference Paper at ICML-2025
Authors

This paper was accepted to ICML 2025 in Vancouver, Canada.

Abstract

Cryptic crossword clues are challenging language tasks for which new test sets are released daily by major newspapers on a global basis. Each cryptic clue contains both the definition of the answer to be placed in the crossword grid (in common with regular crosswords), and 'wordplay' that proves that the answer is correct (i.e. a human solver can be confident that an answer is correct without needing crossing words as confirmation). This work describes an LLM-based reasoning system built from open-licensed components that solves cryptic clues by (i) hypothesising answers; (ii) proposing wordplay explanations; and (iii) using a verifier system that operates on codified reasoning steps. Overall, this system establishes a new state-of-the-art performance on the challenging Cryptonite dataset of clues from The Times and The Telegraph newspapers in the UK. Because each proved solution is expressed in Python, interpretable wordplay reasoning for proven answers is available for inspection.

Poster Version

ICML LLMs and Cognition poster thumbnail

Explainer Video

ICML 2025 SlidesLive video will be available soon.

To get an impression of the work, please see the SlideLive verison of the ICLR Workshop Paper "Generating Code to Verify Cryptic Crossword Reasoning" :

9 min explanation video on SlidesLive

It was also super-exciting to get a shout-out from one of the major Cryptic Crossword channels on YouTube: Cracking the Cryptic!

Shout-out during Cracking the Cryptic Intro

And the BiBTeX entry for the arXiv version:

@misc{andrews2025reasoningbasedapproachcrypticcrossword,
  title={A Reasoning-Based Approach to Cryptic Crossword Clue Solving}, 
  author={Martin Andrews and Sam Witteveen},
  year={2025},
  eprint={2506.04824},
  archivePrefix={arXiv},
  primaryClass={cs.CL},
  url={https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.04824}, 
}