This is a general cryptic crossword clue solver, written in Python

nose
web
nltk
tk

python (tested with 2.7)
rake

Clone this repository somewhere convenient, then cd to the folder containing this file.

Run this command to download the Nodebox Linguistics library from http://nodebox.net/code/index.php/Linguistics and the python NLTK Wordnet corpus from http://nltk.org/data.html:

rake download

Generate the n-grams and synonyms datasets by running

rake data

in the main cryptics folder (this will take a few minutes to finish).

Web interface: http://localhost:8080/

rake server

Test cases (requires the python nose package):

rake test

For each clue, you must give the number of letters in the answer, and you may give a letter pattern for the answer to follow, where a '.' represents an unknown letter. For example:

Clue:

Initially babies are naked (4)

Answer:

BARE

Clue:

Lees horse galloping to dangerous_coasts (3,6) l.....r..

Answer:

LEE_SHORES

You can give the solver a hint that a set of words form a phrase (and need not be treated separately) by combining them with an underscore (as in 'dangerous_coasts' above).

The output is given both as a hierarchical representation of the clue structure and as a natural-language description:

100%: (top (sub (sub_ "initially") (lit "babies") -> B) (lit "are") (d "naked") -> BARE) 
'initially' means to take a substring of 'babies' to get B. 
'naked' is the definition. 
Combine 'b' and 'are' to get BARE. 
BARE matches 'naked' with confidence score 100%. 

and

90%: (top (lit "lees") (ana (lit "horse") (ana_ "galloping") -> HORES) (d "to_dangerous_coasts") -> LEE_SHORES) 
'galloping' means to anagram 'horse' to get HORES. 
'to_dangerous_coasts' is the definition. 
Combine 'lees' and 'hores' to get LEE_SHORES. 
LEE_SHORES matches 'to_dangerous_coasts' with confidence score 90%. 

To learn more about how the solver works, see this blog post: http://blog.robindeits.com/2013/02/11/a-cryptic-crossword-clue-solver/.

This program uses the English bigrams corpus from After the Deadline licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.

In addition, it uses the UK Advanced Cryptics Dictionary, Copyright (c) 2009 J Ross Beresford. For license information see raw_data/UKACD.txt.

Indicator word lists are from: http://sutherland-studios.com.au/puzzles/anagram.php http://www.crosswordunclued.com/2008/09/dictionary.html

See LICENSE.txt