Cryptonite: A Cryptic Crossword Benchmark for Extreme Ambiguity in Language

03/01/2021

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by   Avia Efrat, et al.

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Current NLP datasets targeting ambiguity can be solved by a native speaker with relative ease. We present Cryptonite, a large-scale dataset based on cryptic crosswords, which is both linguistically complex and naturally sourced. Each example in Cryptonite is a cryptic clue, a short phrase or sentence with a misleading surface reading, whose solving requires disambiguating semantic, syntactic, and phonetic wordplays, as well as world knowledge. Cryptic clues pose a challenge even for experienced solvers, though top-tier experts can solve them with almost 100 current models; fine-tuning T5-Large on 470k cryptic clues achieves only 7.6 accuracy, on par with the accuracy of a rule-based clue solver (8.6