Team expansion in collaborative environments

Abstract

In this paper, we study the team expansion problem in collaborative environments where people collaborate with each other in the form of a team, which might need to be expanded frequently by having additional team members during the course of the project. Intuitively, there are three factors as well as the interactions between them that have a profound impact on the performance of the expanded team, including (1) the task the team is performing, (2) the existing team members, and (3) the new candidate team member. However, the vast majority of the existing work either considers these factors separately, or even ignores some of these factors. In this paper, we propose a neural network based approach TECE to simultaneously model the interactions between the team task, the team members as well as the candidate team members. Experimental evaluations on real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.