Evaluation of Latent Semantic Analysis-Based Measures of Team Communications Content

Abstract

Team process is thought to mediate team member inputs and team performance. Among the team behaviors identified as process variables, team communications have been widely studied. We view team communications as a team behavior and also as team information processing, or team cognition. Within the context of a Predator Uninhabited Air Vehicle (UAV) synthetic task, we have developed several methods of communications content assessment based on Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA). These methods include: Communications Density (CD) which is the average task relevance of a team's communications, Lag Coherence (LC) which measures task-relevant topic shifting over UAV missions, and Automatic Tagging (AT) which categorizes team communications. Each method is described in detail. CD and LC are related to UAV team performance. AT-human is comparable to human-human agreement on content coding. The results are promising for the assessment of teams based on LSA applied to communication content.