Using Speech Patterns to Model the Dimensions of Teamness in Human-Agent Teams

Teamness is a newly proposed multidimensional construct aimed to characterize teams and their dynamic levels of interdependence over time. Specifically, teamness is deeply rooted in team cognition literature, considering how a team’s composition, processes, states, and actions affect collaboration. With this multifaceted construct being recently proposed, there is a call to the research community to investigate, measure, and model dimensions of teamness. In this study, we explored the speech content of 21 human-human-agent teams during a remote collaborative search task. Using self-report surveys of their social and affective states throughout the task, we conducted factor analysis to condense the survey measures into four components closely aligned with the dimensions outlined in the teamness framework: social dynamics and trust, affect, cognitive load, and interpersonal reliance. We then extracted features from teams’ speech using Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) and performed Epistemic Network Analyses (ENA) across these four teamwork components as well as team performance. We developed six hypotheses of how we expected specific LIWC features to correlate with self-reported team processes and performance, which we investigated through our ENA analyses. Through quantitative and qualitative analyses of the networks, we explore differences of speech patterns across the four components and relate these findings to the dimensions of teamness. Our results indicate that ENA models based on selected LIWC features were able to capture elements of teamness as well as team performance; this technique therefore shows promise for modeling of these states during CSCW, to ultimately design intelligent systems to promote greater teamness using speech-based measures.