TextDream: Conditional Text Generation by Searching in the Semantic Space
Weidi Xu, Haoze Sun, Chao Deng, Ying Tan · 2018
Conditional text generation is a fundamental task in natural language generation. Traditional conditional generative models build conditional probability distributions over the given labels. However, categorical label information is usually very abstract, e.g., sentiment, and it is difficult to be disentangled from the content. Therefore, instead of generating text by modeling conditional probability distribution, we propose a novel text generation method TextDream through searching in the semantic space. Specifically, in this method, a random text seed is initially given and the new text is generated by local search operation. The generation procedure is guided by a fitness function, typically a classification model. Text with higher fitness will be preserved. This procedure loops until the qualified solution is found. Experimental results show that our method is able to generate more diverse text compared with advanced conditional generative models.