# Towards Automatic Generation of Entertaining Dialogues in Chinese Crosstalks

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1711.00294 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.00294/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 1 Nov 2017.

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [Can Language Models Make Fun? A Case Study in Chinese Comical Crosstalk](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.00735/) (2022)
- [CrossDial: An Entertaining Dialogue Dataset of Chinese Crosstalk](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.01370/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Crosstalk, also known by its Chinese name xiangsheng, is a traditional Chinese comedic performing art featuring jokes and funny dialogues, and one of China's most popular cultural elements. It is typically in the form of a dialogue between two performers for the purpose of bringing laughter to the audience, with one person acting as the leading comedian and the other as the supporting role. Though general dialogue generation has been widely explored in previous studies, it is unknown whether such entertaining dialogues can be automatically generated or not. In this paper, we for the first time investigate the possibility of automatic generation of entertaining dialogues in Chinese crosstalks. Given the utterance of the leading comedian in each dialogue, our task aims to generate the replying utterance of the supporting role. We propose a humor-enhanced translation model to address this task and human evaluation results demonstrate the efficacy of our proposed model. The feasibility of automatic entertaining dialogue generation is also verified.