The problem of team formation in a social network asks for a set of individuals who not only have the required skills to perform a task but who can also communicate effectively with each other. Existing work assumes that all links in a social network are positive, that is, they indicate friendship or collaboration between individuals. However, it is often the case that the network is signed, that is, it contains both positive and negative links, corresponding to friend and foe relationships. Building on the concept of structural balance, we provide definitions of compatibility between pairs of users in a signed network, and algorithms for computing it. We then define the team formation problem in signed networks, where we ask for a compatible team of individuals that can perform a task with small communication cost. We show that the problem is NP-hard even when there are no communication cost constraints, and we provide heuristic algorithms for solving it. We present experimental results with real data to investigate the properties of the different compatibility definitions, and the effectiveness of our algorithms.

中文翻译：

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在签名网络中组建兼容的团队

社交网络中的团队组建问题要求一组个人不仅具备执行任务所需的技能，而且还可以有效地相互沟通。现有的工作假设社交网络中的所有链接都是积极的，也就是说，它们表明个人之间的友谊或合作。但是，经常出现的情况是网络是有符号的，即它同时包含正负链接，对应于朋友和敌人的关系。基于结构平衡的概念，我们提供了签名网络中用户对之间兼容性的定义，以及计算它的算法。然后我们定义了签名网络中的团队组建问题，我们要求一个兼容的个人团队，可以以很小的通信成本执行任务。我们表明，即使没有通信成本限制，该问题也是 NP-hard 问题，并且我们提供了启发式算法来解决它。我们用真实数据展示了实验结果，以研究不同兼容性定义的属性，以及我们算法的有效性。