This year I got one paper accepted at CLiC-it 2026! The paper is entitled “Reading Between the Clues: A Fine-Grained Analysis of Italian Crossword Solving Systems” (with Cristiano Ciaccio, Asya Zanollo, Gabriele Sarti, Felice Dell’Orletta and Malvina Nissim). In this work we propose a fine-grained evaluation of crossword solving systems on the Italian language along two complementary annotation axes: a syntactic axis, characterizing each clue according to an improved categorization of the cruciverbese register, and a lexical-semantic axis, capturing the clue-answer relation through cosine distance, named entities, and degree of polysemy. We release an enriched version of an existing Italian crossword dataset annotated along both axes, introduce two novel architectures for crossword clue answering, and conduct an extensive comparative analysis of a broad set of existing systems together with our newly proposed models, surfacing systematic differences in how architectural choices interact with the linguistic properties of clue-answer pairs.
The paper was presented during the conference, that was held in Palermo, by the PhD students Cristiano Ciaccio and Asya Zanollo.