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I work for UPS as software developer and surprisingly, I work for the department that is responsible for parsing addresses and matching them with actual physica
by newprint 8y ago
I work for UPS as software developer and surprisingly, I work for the department that is responsible for parsing addresses and matching them with actual physical addresses. We cover US, CA & EU (incl. UK).
In our department, we have a guy whose entire career at UPS is nothing but maintaining library that parses addresses. It is very hard to get things right, unless you maintain that library all the time.
Genuinely wish you good luck !
- maxerickson 8y agoIt was funded by the now defunct Mapzen. I have no idea, but I wouldn't be surprised if it isn't getting much work done anymore.
- tyingq 8y agoNot your issue, but it makes me so angry that UPS charges me for address corrections ($12 a pop). The UPS supplied software often fails to identify missing suite number, can't figure out "State Route 123" vs "SR 123", etc. UPS is financially rewarded for bugs. Argh :)
- newprint 8y agoSorry to hear that. I would advise you to call UPS and dispute those charges. If the address existed for a while and you can google it, than it is definitely a bug.
- tyingq 8y agoAppreciate it. It's more the policy that's irritating. For example, "missing suite" usually just means the driver has to look at the business name on the shipping label and identify it in the strip mall. $12 charged to the shipper for a few seconds of thought where the UPS software didn't identify "missing suite".
- eruci 8y agoBTW, I'm a guy who has been building address parsing software since 2005. ( geocoder.ca, geocode.xyz ) It is HARD. Currently I'm using machine learning similarly to libpostal to improve my software. It works better than libpostal in some cases (for eg: USA: Start libpostal: 751 FAiR OKS AVENUE PASADNA CA road => fair oks avenue pasadna state => ca house_number => 751 Geocoder.ca 751 FAiR OKS AVENUE PASADNA CA https://geocoder.ca/?locate=751+FAiR+OKS+AVENUE+++PASADNA+CA&geoit=x https://geocoder.ca/?locate=751+FAiR+OKS+AVENUE+++PASADNA+CA... stnumber: 751 staddress: N Fair Oaks Ave city: Pasadena prov: CA postal: 91103-3069 libpostal from Little Plate Shop 9 11 Deodar Drive Burliegh Heads QLD 4220 house => LITTLE PLATE SHOP city => HEADS postcode => 4220 road => DEODAR DRIVE BURLIEGH state => QLD house_number => 9 11 Geocode.xyz Little Plate Shop 9 11 Deodar Drive Burliegh Heads QLD 4220 addresst: DEODAR DR region: QLD postal: 4220 stnumber: 11 prov: AU city: BURLEIGH HEADS countryname: Australia confidence: 0.7 And it works worse in some other cases... Anyways, good luck to this developer. I don't think anyone will ever produce a solution that works better than all others, but it is better if more of us try.
- microcolonel 8y agoI think that there is a good solution: supervised learning/segmentation with direct user verification. You have the user enter a free form address, and then translate it into a structured address. If they correct any fields, you look at those and try to figure out if the final result is correct or not, and integrate that. Maybe this could be done as a service with iframes (like ReCaptcha); and since the information in a full address is basically entirely public knowledge (at least in the U.S.), you can keep all of it around in full detail.
- taf2 8y agoSeems like this work should be open source, is it already? If not why? Publicly funded work like this seems like it should by default be open source?