After looking at this paper and the image generation quality : Generating Diverse High-Fidelity Images with VQ-VAE-2, I wondered if such models can be used for text generation. And I noticed that most of the similar papers discussing discrete latent space models, don’t talk about text at all, all the experiments seem to be done on images or audio domain.

What gives ? Intuitively I would think it makes sense for discrete latent space models to be quite useful for text considering it’s discrete nature. Can anyone explain this or provide links to papers that successfully generate quality text from a discrete latent space?