  Crossword puzzles are one of the most popular word games, played in different
languages all across the world, where riddle style can vary significantly from
one country to another. Automated crossword resolution is challenging, and
typical solvers rely on large databases of previously solved crosswords. In
this work, we extend WebCrow 2.0, an automatic crossword solver, to French,
making it the first program for crossword solving in the French language. To
cope with the lack of a large repository of clue-answer crossword data, WebCrow
2.0 exploits multiple modules, called experts, that retrieve candidate answers
from heterogeneous resources, such as the web, knowledge graphs, and linguistic
rules. We compared WebCrow's performance against humans in two different
challenges. Despite the limited amount of past crosswords, French WebCrow was
competitive, actually outperforming humans in terms of speed and accuracy, thus
proving its capabilities to generalize to new languages.
