A Streaming Approach to Neural Team Formation Training

Predicting future successful teams of experts who can effectively collaborate is challenging due to the experts' temporality of skill sets, levels of expertise, and collaboration ties, which is overlooked by prior work. Specifically, state-of-the-art neural-based methods learn vector representations of experts and skills in a static latent space, falling short of incorporating the possible drift and variability of experts' skills and collaboration ties in time. In this paper, we propose (1) a streaming-based training strategy for neural models to capture the evolution of experts' skills and collaboration ties over time and (2) to consume time information as an additional signal to the model for predicting future successful teams. We empirically benchmark our proposed method against state-of-the-art neural team formation methods and a strong temporal recommender system on datasets from varying domains with distinct distributions of skills and experts in teams. The results demonstrate neural models that utilize our proposed training strategy excel at efficacy in terms of classification and information retrieval metrics. The codebase is available at https://github.com/fani-lab/OpeNTF/tree/ecir24.