Using Experience on the Read/Write Web: The GhostWriter System

On the Read/Write Web, users are authors as much as they are searchers. We describe one concrete example of this, a waste exchange service where users submit descriptions of items that they have available but wish to get rid of. It is generally to the advantage of subsequent users if authors write comprehensive descriptions. We propose that successful descriptions, i.e. ones which did result in the user passing on an item for reuse, be used as cases. We describe the GhostWriter system that we have designed and built: it makes content authoring suggestions using feature-values extracted from the cases. We end with a preliminary, offline ablation study, which shows promising results.