Topic-Guided Variational Auto-Encoder for Text Generation

We propose a topic-guided variational auto-encoder (TGVAE) model for text generation. Distinct from existing variational auto-encoder (VAE) based approaches, which assume a simple Gaussian prior for latent code, our model specifies the prior as a Gaussian mixture model (GMM) parametrized by a neural topic module. Each mixture component corresponds to a latent topic, which provides a guidance to generate sentences under the topic. The neural topic module and the VAE-based neural sequence module in our model are learned jointly. In particular, a sequence of invertible Householder transformations is applied to endow the approximate posterior of the latent code with high flexibility during the model inference. Experimental results show that our TGVAE outperforms its competitors on both unconditional and conditional text generation, which can also generate semantically-meaningful sentences with various topics.