Meaning in Life: Category Self-Ratings
Summary An earlier study reported development of a reliable scale for categorizing the content of meaning in one's life. The present study concentrated upon validation of this scale by investigating whether 112 undergraduates would tend to place their own meanings in the same content categories as would an outside rater. A high percentage (75%) of the subjects' ratings did agree with those of the outside rater. Subjects were also asked whether they thought that others knew of their meaning (56% answered affirmatively). A .42 correlation was found between the subjects' rating of their meaning depth and ratings done by an outside rater. Percentage of subjects having no meaning (5%) and the frequency distribution of the meaning categories were similar to the earlier study although the 21% of meanings placed in the Miscellaneous category was much higher.
1 Summary For Case Western Reserve University’s debut participation in TREC, we chose to participate in the Enterprise Track expert search task. Our motivation for participation stems from our work developing expert search capability for our prototype vertical digital library, MEMS World Online 1 . Our work incorporates two unique aspects. First, our relevance ranking mechanism relies on term position within each document rather than the number of term occurrences. This mechanism takes into account both term document rank and term co-occurrence proximity. Second, the expert score of closely related colleagues has a small eect on the score of each related expert. This follows the intuition that experts on a particular topic within a single organization tend to closely collaborate with one another. We also make some use of WordNet synonyms. We submitted a total of three runs to this years expert search task.