From Rosetta to Match-Up: A Paired Corpus of Linguistic Puzzles with Human and LLM Benchmarks

Neh Majmudar, Anne Huang, Jinfan Frank Hu, Elena Filatova


Abstract
In this paper, we examine linguistic puzzles used in high school linguistics competitions, focusing on two common formats: Rosetta Stone and Match-Up. We propose a systematic procedure for converting existing Rosetta Stone puzzles into corresponding Match-Up counterparts. Because linguistic puzzle creation is complex and time-consuming, our method provides an efficient way to accelerate the generation of new puzzles. We evaluate the resulting Rosetta Stone–Match-Up pairs with both human participants and large language models (LLMs). Our results show that both expert human solvers and LLMs display an all-or-nothing pattern on Match-Up puzzles, either solving them completely or failing entirely. This work contributes a new dataset of paired puzzles and provides a detailed evaluation of puzzle difficulty across formats, offering insights into both human and machine linguistic reasoning.
Anthology ID:
2026.lrec-main.509
Volume:
Proceedings of the Fifteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference
Month:
May
Year:
2026
Address:
Palma de Mallorca, Spain
Editors:
Stelios Piperidis, Núria Bel, Henk van den Heuvel, Nancy Ide, Simon Krek, Antonio Toral
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
ELRA Language Resource Association
Note:
Pages:
6418–6427
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-lrec/2026.lrec-main.509/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Neh Majmudar, Anne Huang, Jinfan Frank Hu, and Elena Filatova. 2026. From Rosetta to Match-Up: A Paired Corpus of Linguistic Puzzles with Human and LLM Benchmarks. International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation, main:6418–6427.
Cite (Informal):
From Rosetta to Match-Up: A Paired Corpus of Linguistic Puzzles with Human and LLM Benchmarks (Majmudar et al., LREC 2026)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-lrec/2026.lrec-main.509.pdf