Chasing Ghosts on the Airbnb Platform

The rise of Airbnb has come with considerable costs to cities, not least the growth of a shadow industry of seemingly individualised homes that are, in fact, part of a large portfolio and some of which evade regulations intended to protect long-term lettings. However, since these listings are designed to appear distinct, detecting the scale of these operations presents significant challenges. This paper presents early work intended to examine how Natural Language Processing techniques can augment existing spatial analytic ones in order to assist in the detection of ghosts.