  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.
