CatVRNN: Generating Category Texts via Multi-task Learning

Controlling the model to generate texts of different categories is a challenging task that is getting more and more attention. Recently, generative adversarial net (GAN) has shown promising results in category text generation. However, the texts generated by GANs usually suffer from the problems of mode collapse and training instability. To avoid the above problems, we propose a novel model named category-aware variational recurrent neural network (CatVRNN), which is inspired by multi-task learning. In our model, generation and classification are trained simultaneously, aiming at generating texts of different categories. Moreover, the use of multi-task learning can improve the quality of generated texts, when the classification task is appropriate. And we propose a function to initialize the hidden state of CatVRNN to force model to generate texts of a specific category. Experimental results on three datasets demonstrate that our model can do better than several state-of-the-art text generation methods based GAN in the category accuracy and quality of generated texts.