CrossDial: An Entertaining Dialogue Dataset of Chinese Crosstalk

TL;DR

CrossDial is the first open-source Chinese crosstalk dataset, enabling research on dialogue generation in a traditional humorous art form, highlighting current models' challenges and future research directions.

Contribution

This paper introduces CrossDial, a comprehensive dataset of Chinese crosstalks, and defines new tasks and benchmarks for crosstalk dialogue generation.

Findings

Current models struggle with crosstalk generation

Crosstalk generation remains a challenging task

The dataset facilitates future research in humorous dialogue generation

Abstract

Crosstalk is a traditional Chinese theatrical performance art. It is commonly performed by two performers in the form of a dialogue. With the typical features of dialogues, crosstalks are also designed to be hilarious for the purpose of amusing the audience. In this study, we introduce CrossDial, the first open-source dataset containing most classic Chinese crosstalks crawled from the Web. Moreover, we define two new tasks, provide two benchmarks, and investigate the ability of current dialogue generation models in the field of crosstalk generation. The experiment results and case studies demonstrate that crosstalk generation is challenging for straightforward methods and remains an interesting topic for future works.