  Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) have gained a lot of attention from
machine learning community due to their ability to learn and mimic an input
data distribution. GANs consist of a discriminator and a generator working in
tandem playing a min-max game to learn a target underlying data distribution;
when fed with data-points sampled from a simpler distribution (like uniform or
Gaussian distribution). Once trained, they allow synthetic generation of
examples sampled from the target distribution. We investigate the application
of GANs to generate synthetic feature vectors used for speech emotion
recognition. Specifically, we investigate two set ups: (i) a vanilla GAN that
learns the distribution of a lower dimensional representation of the actual
higher dimensional feature vector and, (ii) a conditional GAN that learns the
distribution of the higher dimensional feature vectors conditioned on the
labels or the emotional class to which it belongs. As a potential practical
application of these synthetically generated samples, we measure any
improvement in a classifier's performance when the synthetic data is used along
with real data for training. We perform cross-validation analyses followed by a
cross-corpus study.
