  We empirically characterize the performance of discriminative and generative
LSTM models for text classification. We find that although RNN-based generative
models are more powerful than their bag-of-words ancestors (e.g., they account
for conditional dependencies across words in a document), they have higher
asymptotic error rates than discriminatively trained RNN models. However we
also find that generative models approach their asymptotic error rate more
rapidly than their discriminative counterparts---the same pattern that Ng &
Jordan (2001) proved holds for linear classification models that make more
naive conditional independence assumptions. Building on this finding, we
hypothesize that RNN-based generative classification models will be more robust
to shifts in the data distribution. This hypothesis is confirmed in a series of
experiments in zero-shot and continual learning settings that show that
generative models substantially outperform discriminative models.
