Latent Template Induction with Gumbel-CRFs

Learning to control the structure of sentences is a challenging problem in text generation. Existing work either relies on simple deterministic approaches or RL-based hard structures. We explore the use of structured variational autoencoders to infer latent templates for sentence generation using a soft, continuous relaxation in order to utilize reparameterization for training. Specifically, we propose a Gumbel-CRF, a continuous relaxation of the CRF sampling algorithm using a relaxed Forward-Filtering Backward-Sampling (FFBS) approach. As a reparameterized gradient estimator, the Gumbel-CRF gives more stable gradients than score-function based estimators.