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🐶 All of the Good Dogs in New York 🐶

by Michael HoffmanJanuary 3rd, 2018

Too Long; Didn't Read

🎉 I’ve launched <a href="https://twitter.com/GoodDogsOfNYC" target="_blank">a new Twitter bot</a> that tells the stories of all of the very good dogs who live in New York City.

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The making of Good Dogs of NYC, a Twitter bot about real doggies

🎉 I’ve launched a new Twitter bot that tells the stories of all of the very good dogs who live in New York City.

The data the bot uses originates from a ~90k row CSV of dog licensing data obtained from the city of New York via a FOIA request. I was alerted to the existence of this data by Parker Higgins, who was messing around with it and had converted it to a more useful format.

The moment I got my hands on the data, I knew what I had to do:

Now that the bot is live, I wanted to share some info about the process of making it.

Nuts and Bolts

Ok, this is pretty banal, but there are a thousand ways to build and deploy a Twitter bot, and sometimes it’s interesting to see how others do it. So here goes, very quickly:

Good Dogs of NYC is a Ruby application that uses Active Record to talk to a PostgreSQL database and the Twitter gem to tweet. It’s deployed on Heroku as an app with no dynos. I use the free Heroku Scheduler add-on to run an executable script that does the tweeting. It runs every 10 minutes and tweets 1 out of every 8 times it runs.

Ok that was pretty boring. Here’s another good dog to cleanse your palate:

The Neighborhood Problem

As always with this kind of project, a bunch of labor went into cleaning and massaging the data into a usable form. The most time-consuming part of this was around locations. The data provided each dog’s ZIP code, but I wanted to refer to NYC neighborhoods. So I set out to find a mapping of NYC ZIP codes to neighborhoods. Easy, right?

Nope. The only ZIP-neighborhood mapping available online is provided by the NYC Department of Health, but it isn’t specific enough with its neighborhoods (“Southern Brooklyn” doesn’t cut it), and it was missing a bunch of codes that appeared in my data set.

So I took a closer look at the ZIP codes in the data, and discovered why no one had created this mapping before:

The dataset contained 307 ZIP codes (!).
There are several types of ZIP codes. Some ZIP codes in the data set are the standard kind that map to a region of the city. Others (so-called “unique ZIP codes”) are for large entities such as hospitals, and still others only apply to PO Boxes. (Do dogs live in hospitals and PO Boxes? WTH?)
Neighborhood boundaries in NYC are vague and there is no central authority that defines them.
And the big one: Even for standard ZIP codes, the ZIP-neighborhood relationship is highly many-to-many, meaning that there are many ZIPs that span multiple neighborhoods, and many neighborhoods that span multiple ZIP codes.

So, I improvised. I settled on 182 codes that covered more than 99% of my doggie friends. For each of these, I searched for the ZIP on Google Maps. Then —and this is the real 1337 haxor part—I squinted at the screen and chose the neighborhood that, according to Google, looked like it mapped best to the ZIP codes’s region.

Here’s the final result of that tedious work. (If you want to use this data, Please keep in mind that some arbitrary choices went into the generation of that data because of (4) above.)

Data into Words

I’ve long been interested in programmatically generating prose descriptions of data. This is something I worked on in a pretty naive way in my first tech job, and it’s still a big business (for at least one firm).

This interest is one reason I like Twitter bots. Each bot I’ve created—The Meaning of Life, Important Animal (now defunct), and Father John Botsy—is in the text generation genre. Each time I built a bot, I did just enough work to generate the text for that bot. This time, I wanted to take a more abstract, reusable approach.

The result is the Wordz gem. Wordz is a lightweight generative text library. You declare the structure of the text you want to generate—a “grammar”—and optionally specify some objects that hold the text bits you want to compose. Here’s a small fragment of Good Dogs’ grammar as json:

{"<root>": [["<body>", "<tag>|0.1", "<sign_off>"]],"<body>": [["<salutation_with_name>", "Hi.|0.1", "<short_sentences_body>", "Hi.|0.1"],["<long_sentence_body>", "<salutation_with_name>", "Hi.|0.1"]],"<salutation_with_name>": [["Hi, my name is", "#dog#name#", "."],["<bark>|0.2", "I am", "#dog#name#", "."],["Oh hi. It is", "#dog#name#", "here|0.3", "."]],

.... etc etc etc

}

The angle-bracketed elements here, like <body>, refer to other keys in the grammar, and enable you to build up complex structures from simple pieces. Method call elements such as #dog#name# will pass the message (in this case name)to the specified object (in this case the one you’ve called dog). For Good Dogs, this is a record of a good dog pulled form the database. Other elements are string literals. For every type of element, you can optionally append a probability, e.g. Hi.|0.1. This means: add “Hi.” to the text 10% of the time, and do nothig the rest of the time. Wordz recursively evaluates your grammar using the objects you input, and assembles it into a list of phrases.

Once Wordz has a list of phrases, a post-processing step that joins the text together into sentences with proper spacing. Most of the time we want to join everything together with spaces in between, but there are exceptions, such as ["I am", "#dog#name#", "!"], which we want to generate "I am dog name!" not "I am dog name !".

There’s also facility for string literals which have special effects in post-processing. Right now the only example of this is the string $INDEF_ARTICLE, which gets replaced in post-processing by either “a” or “an” depending on the phrase that follows it.

Planned future work on Wordz:

Add in conditional logic into the generation step, whereby you could specify in the grammar that a fragment of text should be included only if some condition, defined by a function call, is met.
Allow Wordz users to define their own post-processing functions. (E.g. you might want one that pluralizes a noun phrase if it’s proceeded by a number word greater than one.)