CrossDial: An Entertaining Dialogue Dataset of Chinese Crosstalk
This work addresses the need for entertaining dialogue generation in a specific cultural domain, but it is incremental as it primarily introduces a dataset and benchmarks without major methodological breakthroughs.
The authors tackled the problem of generating Chinese crosstalk dialogues by introducing CrossDial, the first open-source dataset of classic crosstalks, and found that current models struggle with this task, making it a challenge for future research.
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.