  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.
