16 research outputs found
Computational approaches for engineering effective teams
The performance of a team depends not only on the abilities of its individual
members, but also on how these members interact with each other. Inspired by
this premise and motivated by a large number of applications in educational,
industrial and management settings, this thesis studies a family of problems,
known as team-formation problems, that aim to engineer teams that are
effective and successful. The major challenge in this family of problems is
dealing with the complexity of the human team participants. Specifically, each
individual has his own objectives, demands, and constraints that might be in
contrast with the desired team objective. Furthermore, different collaboration
models lead to different instances of team-formation problems. In this thesis,
we introduce several such models and describe techniques and efficient
algorithms for various instantiations of the team-formation problem.
This thesis consists of two main parts. In the first part, we examine three
distinct team-formation problems that are of significant interest in (i)
educational settings, (ii) industrial organizations, and (iii) management
settings respectively. What constitutes an effective team in each of the
aforementioned settings is totally dependent on the objective of the team. For
instance, the performance of a team (or a study group) in an educational
setting can be measured as the amount of learning and collaboration that takes
place inside the team. In industrial organizations, desirable teams are those
that are cost-effective and highly profitable. Finally in management settings,
an interesting body of research uncovers that teams with faultlines are prone
to performance decrements. Thus, the challenge is to form teams that are free
of faultlines, that is, to form teams that are robust and less likely to break
due to disagreements. The first part of the thesis discusses approaches for
formalizing these problems and presents efficient computational methods for
solving them.
In the second part of the thesis, we consider the problem of improving the
functioning of existing teams. More precisely, we show how we can use models
from social theory to capture the dynamics of the interactions between the team
members. We further discuss how teams can be modified so that the interaction
dynamics lead to desirable outcomes such as higher levels of agreement or
lesser tension and conflict among the team members
A Team-Formation Algorithm for Faultline Minimization
In recent years, the proliferation of online resumes and the need to evaluate
large populations of candidates for on-site and virtual teams have led to a
growing interest in automated team-formation. Given a large pool of candidates,
the general problem requires the selection of a team of experts to complete a
given task. Surprisingly, while ongoing research has studied numerous
variations with different constraints, it has overlooked a factor with a
well-documented impact on team cohesion and performance: team faultlines.
Addressing this gap is challenging, as the available measures for faultlines in
existing teams cannot be efficiently applied to faultline optimization. In this
work, we meet this challenge with a new measure that can be efficiently used
for both faultline measurement and minimization. We then use the measure to
solve the problem of automatically partitioning a large population into
low-faultline teams. By introducing faultlines to the team-formation
literature, our work creates exciting opportunities for algorithmic work on
faultline optimization, as well as on work that combines and studies the
connection of faultlines with other influential team characteristics
Emu: Enhancing Multilingual Sentence Embeddings with Semantic Specialization
We present Emu, a system that semantically enhances multilingual sentence
embeddings. Our framework fine-tunes pre-trained multilingual sentence
embeddings using two main components: a semantic classifier and a language
discriminator. The semantic classifier improves the semantic similarity of
related sentences, whereas the language discriminator enhances the
multilinguality of the embeddings via multilingual adversarial training. Our
experimental results based on several language pairs show that our specialized
embeddings outperform the state-of-the-art multilingual sentence embedding
model on the task of cross-lingual intent classification using only monolingual
labeled data.Comment: AAAI 202
SubjQA: A Dataset for Subjectivity and Review Comprehension
Subjectivity is the expression of internal opinions or beliefs which cannot
be objectively observed or verified, and has been shown to be important for
sentiment analysis and word-sense disambiguation. Furthermore, subjectivity is
an important aspect of user-generated data. In spite of this, subjectivity has
not been investigated in contexts where such data is widespread, such as in
question answering (QA). We therefore investigate the relationship between
subjectivity and QA, while developing a new dataset. We compare and contrast
with analyses from previous work, and verify that findings regarding
subjectivity still hold when using recently developed NLP architectures. We
find that subjectivity is also an important feature in the case of QA, albeit
with more intricate interactions between subjectivity and QA performance. For
instance, a subjective question may or may not be associated with a subjective
answer. We release an English QA dataset (SubjQA) based on customer reviews,
containing subjectivity annotations for questions and answer spans across 6
distinct domains.Comment: EMNLP 2020 Long Paper - Camera Read
Finding low-tension communities
International audienceMotivated by applications that arise in online social media and collaboration networks, there has been a lot of work on community-search. In this class of problems, the goal is to find a subgraph that satisfies a certain connectivity requirement and contains a given collection of seed nodes.In this paper, we extend the community-search problem by associating each individual with a profile. The profile is a numeric score that quantifies the position of an individual with respect to a topic. We adopt a model where each individual starts with a latent profile and arrives to a conformed profile through a dynamic conformation process, which takes into account the individual's social interaction and the tendency to conform with one's social environment. In this framework, social tension arises from the differences between the conformed profiles of neighboring individuals as well as from the differences between individuals' conformed and latent profiles.Given a network of individuals, their latent profiles and this conformation process, we extend the community-search problem by requiring the output subgraphs to have low social tension. From the technical point of view, we study the complexity of this problem and propose algorithms for solving it effectively. Our experimental evaluation in a number of social networks reveals the efficacy and efficiency of our methods