Automated Communication Analysis for Interactive Situation Awareness Assessment

As the military undergoes significant changes including smaller, more deployable dispersed forces the need to find new methods to analyze and assess team behavior including SA has increased significantly. In this new modernized military, if warfighters are to function in a distributed fashion they will need high degree of shared understanding and SA to function effectively. Current methods of assessing team and group performance rely largely on global outcome metrics, which often lack information rich enough to diagnose failures or suggest improvements in collaborative aids. What is required is the development and validation of metrics of shared and team SA that is applicable to dynamic organizations. For this research project we propose to join efforts and use LSA to assess team and shared SA as well as other cognitive processes such as shared understanding and team knowledge building. We will create methods using LSA based tools to automatically assess team communication streams. The output of this phase II effort will be the development of real-time tools for analyzing and predicting SA and other cognitive processes based on team communication.