% Author: Simon-Pierre Boucher — contact@spboucher.ai % % ============================================================================ % UQO Working Paper No. 2 % Decoding Real Estate Descriptions: Semantic Embeddings and Hedonic % Pricing of Residential Properties in Quebec % % Build: latexmk -pdf main.tex (figures are read from ../figures/) % ============================================================================ \documentclass[12pt,letterpaper]{article} \input{preamble} % ============================================================================ % METADATA % ============================================================================ \newcommand{\WPnumber}{2} \newcommand{\WPtitle}{Decoding Real Estate Descriptions: Semantic Embeddings and Hedonic Pricing of Residential Properties in Quebec} \newcommand{\WPsubtitle}{} \newcommand{\WPdate}{May 2026} \newcommand{\WPversion}{1.1} \newcommand{\WPabstract}{% This paper develops an interpretable NLP approach to hedonic pricing that projects sentence-transformer embeddings of property listing descriptions onto 20 researcher-defined semantic references, producing economically meaningful features. Using 17,087 single-family listings from Quebec, Canada, I show that adding cosine-similarity measures to a standard hedonic model increases adjusted $R^2$ from 0.452 to 0.511 ($F=99.53$, $p<0.001$). Modern/contemporary language is associated with $+$16.4\% prices per standard deviation; luxury $+$14.2\%; land/nature $+$13.0\%. Renovation-need language is associated with $-$7.9\% and seller urgency $-$8.5\%. Quantile regressions reveal heterogeneous effects across the price distribution, and the estimates are robust to bootstrap inference and outlier trimming.% } \newcommand{\WPkeywords}{hedonic pricing, NLP, sentence embeddings, cosine similarity, real estate valuation, Quebec} \newcommand{\WPjel}{R31, C45, C21, R21} % --- Author --- \newcommand{\WPauthor}{Simon-Pierre Boucher} \newcommand{\WPaffiliation}{% D\'epartement des sciences administratives\\ Universit\'e du Qu\'ebec en Outaouais% } \newcommand{\WPemail}{simon-pierre.boucher@uqo.ca} \newcommand{\WPaddress}{% Gatineau -- Pavillon Alexandre-Tach\'e\\ 283, boulevard Alexandre-Tach\'e\\ Gatineau, Qu\'ebec, Canada J9A 1L8% } % --- PDF metadata --- \hypersetup{ pdftitle = {\WPtitle}, pdfauthor = {\WPauthor}, } % ============================================================================ % DOCUMENT % ============================================================================ \begin{document} % --- Title Page & Abstract --- \input{sections/titlepage} % --- Main Body --- \input{sections/introduction} \input{sections/literature} \input{sections/methodology} \input{sections/data} \input{sections/results} \input{sections/robustness} \input{sections/discussion} \input{sections/conclusion} % --- References --- \clearpage \bibliography{references} % --- Appendix --- \clearpage \input{sections/appendix} \end{document}