Problem Statement
Much of the efficacy of any group discussion depends on the collective coordinated communication skills of the individuals participating in the discussion. This becomes even more complex as well as interesting when people from various regions of the world participate in a group meeting. It is because in such a case, cultural norms or backgrounds can bear an effect on the discussion flow. For example, while interruption may not viewed negatively in USA, in other cultures it is frowned upon. Our goal is to analyze the effect of such norms in a culturally diverse group setting and formulate approaches to deal with such diversity leading towards a respectful and healthy group discussion.
Research Questions
● What influences do cultural norms project in a culturally diverse group conversation?
● How would group members change their behaviors upon the awareness of such diversity?
● Is it possible to ameliorate rapport among group members by by making them aware of cross-cultural norms?
Approach
Our base system comes from an existing prototype called CoCo. It allows 4 individuals to conduct video conferences while automatically recording their audio and video data. The audio and video data are analyzed for facial expressions, prosody and language and shown to the participants with the hope of improving their performance as a group. For our project, the extension of the CoCo system would be to the modification of the feedback provider and incorporating new set of features to address cultural norms.
This project works as an observer and feedback provider of group discussion performance. Over a video conferencing among a group of people, the system analyzes team as well as individual performances during the discussion, and provides feedback to the participants to improve their interaction performances keeping their cultural norms into consideration.
Personality Traits VS Cultural Norms
Apparently, people’s personal traits get influenced by the experiences they gather from the places around them. Therefore, we have to find out which features are generated from personality features and which ones are from cultural norms. Hence, we introduce the Big-5 Personality Test as a part of our project; when the sessions are done, the participants would take the test and from there we would analyze their personality and compare it with our system outcome. This test has been used in previous related research work to set a baseline of the traits of users, so we have chosen this one as well. Alongside, it is to be noticed that people’s personality traits get shaped by their culture as well, as shown from previous research; therefore the common traits observed from same culture can be expressed as getting generated from the same culture.
Contributions
● Generating the features related to cross-cultural discussion setting
● Modifying the current feedback provider in accordance with our project demand
● Providing feedback on norms to make participants aware of the features
● Integrating text-analysis to analyze context or tone of the discussion
● Building rapport among group members in such a conversation setting