spb/wp2_uqo Public

1% Author: Simon-Pierre Boucher — contact@spboucher.ai2%3% ============================================================================4% UQO Working Paper No. 25% Decoding Real Estate Descriptions: Semantic Embeddings and Hedonic6% Pricing of Residential Properties in Quebec7%8% Build: latexmk -pdf main.tex   (figures are read from ../figures/)9% ============================================================================10\documentclass[12pt,letterpaper]{article}1112\input{preamble}1314% ============================================================================15% METADATA16% ============================================================================17\newcommand{\WPnumber}{2}18\newcommand{\WPtitle}{Decoding Real Estate Descriptions: Semantic Embeddings and Hedonic Pricing of Residential Properties in Quebec}19\newcommand{\WPsubtitle}{}20\newcommand{\WPdate}{May 2026}21\newcommand{\WPversion}{1.1}22\newcommand{\WPabstract}{%23This 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.%24}25\newcommand{\WPkeywords}{hedonic pricing, NLP, sentence embeddings, cosine similarity, real estate valuation, Quebec}26\newcommand{\WPjel}{R31, C45, C21, R21}2728% --- Author ---29\newcommand{\WPauthor}{Simon-Pierre Boucher}30\newcommand{\WPaffiliation}{%31  D\'epartement des sciences administratives\\32  Universit\'e du Qu\'ebec en Outaouais%33}34\newcommand{\WPemail}{simon-pierre.boucher@uqo.ca}35\newcommand{\WPaddress}{%36  Gatineau -- Pavillon Alexandre-Tach\'e\\37  283, boulevard Alexandre-Tach\'e\\38  Gatineau, Qu\'ebec, Canada J9A 1L8%39}4041% --- PDF metadata ---42\hypersetup{43  pdftitle  = {\WPtitle},44  pdfauthor = {\WPauthor},45}4647% ============================================================================48% DOCUMENT49% ============================================================================50\begin{document}5152% --- Title Page & Abstract ---53\input{sections/titlepage}5455% --- Main Body ---56\input{sections/introduction}57\input{sections/literature}58\input{sections/methodology}59\input{sections/data}60\input{sections/results}61\input{sections/robustness}62\input{sections/discussion}63\input{sections/conclusion}6465% --- References ---66\clearpage67\bibliography{references}6869% --- Appendix ---70\clearpage71\input{sections/appendix}7273\end{document}74