Analyzing Used-Car Web Listings via Text Mining

Abstract

Used car trade is one of the major components of the world economies. It is not uncommon to sell a car by placing an internet advertisement irrespective of the geography in these days. A typical content of an advertisement is usually composed of two parts namely the structured and the free text data. The structured data may include some information about the asking price, make, model, year, mileage of the car and the contact info. In most cases, seller may give important clues about the car's current conditions in the free text data where the title (head) of the advertisement can be included as free text too. This paper reports preliminary results from a text mining study conducted on 75K used car internet listings collected from two major car listing web sites in Turkey. As expected, the words and the phrases related to the description of the car are observed to be frequent. The leading concepts in the free text are found to be regarding how to describe the current condition of a car, for example no crash history.