Data mining the cross-cultural communication gap

This paper describes an exploratory method for examining cross-cultural communication gaps within a team of IT professionals (working from US and India). An automated tool to analyze structured and unstructured text data, Business Insights Workbench (BIW), was applied to their (transcribed) weekly status meeting dataset. The analysis indicates that cohesiveness (the use of similar terms in the conversation) of the group is stronger within a location than between locations. It also illustrates the difference in speaker turns (the US is six times as much as India). Though this work is exploratory, these differences are potential indicators for communication gaps.