Paraphrase Generation Based on VAE and Pointer-Generator Networks

Paraphrase generation is a challenging task that involves expressing the meaning of a sentence using synonyms or different phrases, either to achieve variations or a certain stylistic response. Most previous sequence-to-sequence (Seq2Seq) models focus on either generating variations or preserving the content. We mainly address the issue of preserving the content in a sentence while generating diverse paraphrases. In this paper, we propose a novel approach for paraphrase generation using variational autoencoder (VAE) and Pointer Generator Network (PGN). The proposed model uses a copy mechanism to control the content transfer, a VAE to introduce variations and a training technique to restrict the gradient flow for efficient learning. Our evaluations on QUORA and MS COCO datasets show that our model outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches and the generated paraphrases are highly diverse as well as consistent with their original meaning.