Forming Teams by Psychological Traits -- An Effective Method of Developing Groups in an Educational Environment

Every person is unique and has different sets of individual traits and characteristics. Although people possess different types of personalities, in the end they manage to understand each other and interact regardless of these differences. Starting from the simplest language elements, a simple remark is that, in general, people use certain words more frequently than others. These words might reveal important aspects of their behavior and even an insight of their psychological traits. With advances in computer technology, automatic analysis tools allow us to quickly evaluate features of what people are trying to express and extract some psychological traits. Our research is focused on finding a viable and, nevertheless, elaborated method of recommending a new member to a team of students working on a university project. In this context, we are exploring the match or complementarity between psychological traits, automatically determined through specific questionnaires and by analyzing the words a person uses in daily activities. Moreover, by combining a predefined questionnaire, lexical indicators with semantic and non-verbal ones and by deploying a collaborative filtering recommending system combined with team formation heuristics, we are able to define a specific approach, based on an educational scenario that can be used for determining and forming teams in an academic environment.