Twilio - is there a place to find out formatting requirements? - twilio

I have been all through the Twilio API docs, and I can't seem to find what requirements they have for certain inputs. For instance, I found that if I am searching for a number in a city, the city can't have any punctuation in it, but sometimes the abbreviated name is required. For instance, searching for in_locality="Ft. Worth" and in_locality="Ft Worth" won't work, but in_locality="Fort Worth" does. Oddly though, other abbreviations are somewhat required, like in_locality="St George" works, but in_locality="Saint George" does not, nor does in_locality="St. George"
Are there any rules for this written down anywhere, or do I just have to figure out every permutation of an abbreviated city name by magic, and try them all?

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Best ways in text parsing for Job description (JD parsing)?

I am a developer and having little knowledge in text parsing.
I need to parse the Job description and get some outputs. I need to parse the following fields from Job description.
Job Responsibilities,
Qualification,
Specialization,
Domain,
Skills Required,
Job Description,
Work Experience Min,
Work Experience Max,
Industry,
Occupation,
Functional Area,
Currency,
Salary,
Salary Type,
Employment Type,
Work Authorisation,
Required Visa Status,
Required English Level,
Country,
State,
City,
Zipcode,
Address of Job.
To accomplish this, I am utilizing the Regex pattern matching. But the output efficiency is low many times. It sometimes requires exact pattern to identify the parameters. So it fails many times.
I found other ways too.
Named Entity Recognition:
By using Stanford NLp, I am able to get the location, address. But I don't know how can I train the module for other parameters or we have any possibilities.
Fuzzy logic:
Did some research on fuzzy logic to validate the results.
My questions are,
1. What are the approaches to accomplish the JD parsing?
2. How effective is NER?
3. Is there any conceivable outcomes to use fuzzy logic in JD text parsing?
Any help would be really appriciated.
I think you can try dependency parsing if regex doesn't work accurately. NER will not support all the findings you need. Employment type is something would like to learn from you as well.

Find location from text

I am currently thinking of how to find a location from a text, such as a blogpost, without the user having to input any additional information. For example a post could look like this:
"Aberdeen, With a Foot on the Seafloor
Since the early 1970s, Aberdeen, Scotland, has evolved from a gritty fishing town into the world’s center of innovation in technology for the offshore energy industry."
By reading it I realize that the post is about Aberdeen Scotland but how can I geotag it? I have been using the geocoder (https://github.com/alexreisner/geocoder) by Alex Reisner but it seems weird to check every word against the google/nominatim(osm). My initial idea was to simply bruteforce it by checking every word with the geocoder and try to see if there are similarities between the words. But it seems like there could be a better way around this.
Has anyone done anything similar to this? Any algorithm that could be suggested (or gem :) ) would be immensely appreciated!
I'm sure there have been projects dedicated to this - for example, google's uncanny ability to geotag and pick data out of your personal emails effortlessly.
The most obvious answer I can see here, would be to create a few regular expressions for locations. The most simple one would be for City, Country:
Regexp.new("((?:[a-z][a-z]+))(.)(\\s+)((?:[a-z][a-z]+))",Regexp::IGNORECASE);
This would recognize Aberdeen, Scotland, but also course, I or even thanks, bye. It would be a start though, to query only those recognized spots instead of every word in the document.
There are also widely known regular expressions for addresses, cities, etc. You could use those as well if you find your algorithm missing matches.
Cheers!

Profanity filter import

I am looking to write a basic profanity filter in a Rails based application. This will use a simply search and replace mechanism whenever the appropriate attribute gets submitted by a user. My question is, for those who have written these before, is there a CSV file or some database out there where a list of profanity words can be imported into my database? We are submitting the words that we will replace the profanities with on our own. We more or less need a database of profanities, racial slurs and anything that's not exactly rated PG-13 to get triggered.
As the Tin Man suggested, this problem is difficult, but it isn't impossible. I've built a commercial profanity filter named CleanSpeak that handles everything mentioned above (leet speak, phonetics, language rules, whitelisting, etc). CleanSpeak is capable of filtering 20,000 messages per second on a low end server, so it is possible to build something that works well and performs well. I will mention that CleanSpeak is the result of about 3 years of on-going development though.
There are a few things I tell everyone that is looking to try and tackle a language filter.
Don't use regular expressions unless you have a small list and don't mind a lot of things getting through. Regular expressions are relatively slow overall and hard to manage.
Determine if you want to handle conjugations, inflections and other language rules. These often add a considerable amount of time to the project.
Decide what type of performance you need and whether or not you can make multiple passes on the String. The more passes you make the slow your filter will be.
Understand the scunthrope and clbuttic problems and determine how you will handle these. This usually requires some form of language intelligence and whitelisting.
Realize that whitespace has a different meaning now. You can't use it as a word delimiter any more (b e c a u s e of this)
Be careful with your handling of punctuation because it can be used to get around the filter (l.i.k.e th---is)
Understand how people use ascii art and unicode to replace characters (/ = v - those are slashes). There are a lot of unicode characters that look like English characters and you will want to handle those appropriately.
Understand that people make up new profanity all the time by smashing words together (likethis) and figure out if you want to handle that.
You can search around StackOverflow for my comments on other threads as I might have more information on those threads that I've forgotten here.
Here's one you could use: Offensive/Profane Word List from CMU site
Based on personal experience, you do understand that it's an exercise in futility?
If someone wants to inject profanity, there's a slew of words that are innocent in one context, and profane in another so you'll have to write a context parser to avoid black-listing clean words. A quick glance at CMU's list shows words I'd never consider rude/crude/socially unacceptable. You'll see there are many words that could be proper names or nouns, countries, terms of endearment, etc. And, there are myriads of ways to throw your algorithm off using L33T speak and such. Search Wikipedia and the internets and you can build tables of variations of letters.
Look at CMU's list and imagine how long the list would be if, in addition to the correct letter, every a could also be 4, o could be 0 or p, e could be 3, s could be 5. And, that's a very, very, short example.
I was asked to do a similar task and wrote code to generate L33T variations of the words, and generated a hit-list of words based on several profanity/offensive lists available on the internet. After running the generator, and being a little over 1/4 of the way through the file, I had over one million entries in my DB. I pulled the plug on the project at that point, because the time spent searching, even using Perl's Regex::Assemble, was going to be ridiculous, especially since it'd still be so easy to fool.
I recommend you have a long talk with whoever requested that, and ask if they understand the programming issues involved, and low-likelihood of accuracy and success, especially over the long-term, or the possible customer backlash when they realize you're censoring them.
I have one that I've added to (obfuscated a bit) but here it is: https://github.com/rdp/sensible-cinema/blob/master/lib/subtitle_profanity_finder.rb

Is it possible to create a mask to handle non-north american phone numbers?

For north american phone numbers, (999) 999-9999 works pretty well for an input mask.
However, I can't find a good example that will handle non-north american numbers. I know that the number of digits can vary, so other than restricting it to digits only, is there a good example anywhere?
There is no generic mask, really: There are too many combinations.
The only thing that is fixed is the international country code, usually prefixed by +.
According to the Wikipedia Article on telephone numbering plans, most countries conform with the E.164 numbering plan.
If I read E.164 correctly, you can safely make the following assumptions:
Country code: 1-3 digits
Network / Area code and Number: Up to 19 digits
I would ask for the country code, and have the "area code + number" field as a 19-digit input.
You can deduce the country code with a simple RegEx such as:
^(?:(?:0(?:0|11)\s?)|+)([17]|2([07]|[1-689]\d)|3([0-469]|[578]\d)|4([013-9]|2\d)|5([1-8]|[09]\d)|6([0-6]|[789]\d)|8([12469]|[03578]\d)|9([0-58]|[679]\d))
Followed by
(([\s\(\).-]{0,2}\d){4,13})$
to extract the national number.
For validating the national number length and validity, you'd need libphonenumber or similar.
The long RegEx above allows +, 00 or 011 before the country code and a selection of punctuation in the number which will also have to be stripped.
You don't mention your application but this is certainly possible using regular expressions. You might want to take a look here.
Not easily. Take a look at this page for an example why: if you only look at the German phone numbers, you'll note that there are different formats depending on where you're calling the number from. Which one do you pick? And that's just for German phone numbers; they differ from continent to continent, and from country to country.
Going with "numbers-only" is probably your safest bet.
I would allow for spaces, dashes, slashes and all that, but actually only care for numbers and the optional leading + sign. Everything else, such as assuming certain blocks of a certain length is just asking for trouble.
May be it is bad to answer an old question. But libphonenumber seems like a good solution to your question.

What are all of the allowable characters for people's names? [closed]

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Closed 10 years ago.
There are the standard A-Z, a-z characters, but also there are hyphens, em dashes, quotes, etc.
Plus, there are all of the international characters, like umlauts, etc.
So, for an English-based system, what's the complete set? What about sets for other languages? What about UTF8, UTF16, etc?
Bonus question: How many name fields are needed, and what are their maximum lengths?
EDIT: There are definitely two different types of characters involved in people's names, those that are there as part of the context, and those that are there for structural reasons. I don't want to limit or interfere with the context characters, but I do need to deal with the structural ones.
For example, I had a name come in that was separated by an em dash, but it was hard to distinguish that from the minus character. To make the system easier for searching, I want to take all five different types of dashes, and map them onto one unique character (minus), that way the searcher doesn't need to know specifically which symbol was initially entered.
The problem exists for dashes, probably quotes as well, but also how many other symbols?
There's good article by the W3C called Personal names around the world that explains the problems (and possible solutions) pretty well (it was originally a two-part blog post by Richard Ishida: part 1 and part 2)
Personally I'd say: support every printable Unicode-Character and to be safe provide just a single field "name" that contains the full, formatted name. This way you can store pretty much every form of name. You might need a more structured storage, but then don't expect to be able to store every single combination in a structured form, as there are simply too many different ones.
Whitelisting characters that could appear in a person's name is the wrong way to go, if you ask me. Sure, [A-Za-z] is a fair starting point, but, as you said, you get problems with "European" names. So you map all the umlauts, circumflexes and those. What about Chinese names? Japanese? Indian? Hebrew? You're entering a battle against wind turbines.
If you absolutely must check the validity of someone's name, I'd suggest doing a modest blacklist of certain characters. Braces, mathematical characters, some punctuation and such might be safe to ignore. But I'd be cautious, if I were you.
It might be best to just accept whatever comes in. UTF-16 should be today's overkill character set, that should be adequate for some years to come.
Edit: As for your question about name length and amount of names. If you really want people to write their real and complete names, I guess the only foolproof answer to both of those questions would be "infinite". Not being able to whip out any real examples for human beings, but surely there are analogous examples for humans as the native name for the city of Bangkok.
I don't think there's a definitive answer. After all, some people have names that can't even be expressed in UTF-16...
There are some odd people out there, who will give their kids the craziest of names, including putting in weird punctuation, accents that don't exist in their own language, etc.
However, you can place arbitrary restrictions on your database. If you want to you can insist on 7 bit ASCII names. It's slightly rude to users, but they'll live with it. It certainly makes searching easier.
My colleague's daughter is named Amélie. But even some (not all!) official British government web sites ("Please enter the name exactly as shown on the birth certificate") won't accept the unicode, so he has to use 'Amelie' instead.
Any character that can be represented by any multiple of eight bits (greater than zero) is a possible character for a person's name. Lengths of both names and encodings are arbitrary, so no upper bound should be considered.
Just make sure you sanitize your database inputs so little Bobby Drop-tables doesn't get ya.
On the issue of name fields, the WRONG answer is first name, middle initial, last name, etc. for many reasons.
Many people are known by their middle name, and formally use a first initial, middle name, last name format.
In some cultures, the surname is the first name, and the given name is the last name.
Multiple first and/or middle given names is getting more common. As #Dour High Arch points out, the other extreme is people with only one word in their name.
In an object-oriented database, you would store a Name object with methods to return a directory-style or signature-style name; and the backing store would contain whatever data was necessary to support those methods.
I haven't yet seen a relational database model that improves on the model of two variable-length strings for directory-style and signature-style names.
I'm making software for driving schools in the USA, so to me what matters most what the state DMV's accept as a proper name on a driver's license. In my case, it would cause problems to allow names beyond what the DMV allows, even if such names were legal because the same name must later be used for a driver's license.
From StackOverflow, I still hadn't confirmed the answer I needed. And I happen to know that in my state (Calif) they're using AS400's with software probably written in COBOL, and to the best of my knowledge, those only support an 8-bit character set. (Is it EBCDIC?) Anyway... Ugh.
So, I called the California DMV... Sure enough, their system allows A-Z and spaces and absolutely nothing else. Not even hyphens are allowed -- Hyphens are replaced with spaces. In fact, apparently just to be difficult, they only use capitals. And names such as "O'Malley" must be replaced with OMALLEY.
Leave it to government. I must say I'm thrilled not to be a developer working for DMV. (Although I could really use that kind of salary.)
It really depends on what the app is supposed to be used for.
Sure, in theory it's great if you allow every script on god's green earth to be used, but if the DB is also used by support staff, are they going to be able to handle names in Japanese, Hebrew and Thai script? Can you printer, if it's used to print postage labels?
You might add an extra field "Latin Transcription", but IMO it's really OK to restrict it to ISO-8859-1 characters - People who don't use Latin characters are by now so used to having to use a transcription that they don't mind it anymore, unless they're hardcore nationalists.
UTF-8 should be good enough, as far as name fields, you'll want at minimum a first name and last.
Depending on the complexity of your name structure I could see:
First Name
Middle Initial/Middle Name
Last Name
Suffix (Jr. Sr. II, III, IV, etc.)
Prefix (Mr., Mrs., Ms., etc.)
What do you do when you have "The Artist Formerly Known as Prince". That symbol he used is not a character in the unicode set (AFAIK).
It's some levity, but at the same time, names are a rather broad concept that doesn't lend itself well to a structured format. In this case, something free-form might be most appropriate.

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