remove nltk dependency on stopwords

requirements.txt

@@ -23,7 +23,6 @@ idna==2.8
 importlib-metadata==1.6.0
 kombu==4.6.8
 lxml==4.6.3
-nltk==3.4.5
 numpy==1.18.1
 oauthlib==3.1.0
 pandas==0.25.3

utils/utils.py

@@ -1,12 +1,7 @@
 import json
 import re
-from nltk.corpus import stopwords
 import requests
 
-def remove_stopwords(input):
-    word_list = input.split(" ")
-    return ' '.join([word.lower() for word in word_list if word.lower() not in stopwords.words('english')]) # remove stop words
-
 def hasPhrase(phrases = [], text = ''):
     return any([phrase for phrase in phrases if phrase.lower() in text.lower() ])
 
@@ -113,3 +108,20 @@ def get_census_block(lat, long):
         if len(data['results']):
             return data['results'][0]['county_fips']
     return ''
+
+def get_stopwords():
+	return ['i ', 'me', 'my', 'myself', 'we', 'our', 'ours', 'ourselves', 'you', 'your', 'yours', 'yourself', 'yourselves', 'he', 'him', 'his', 'himself', 'she', 'her', 'hers', 'herself', 'it', 'its', 'itself', 'they', 'them', 'their', 'theirs', 'themselves', 'what', 'which', 'who', 'whom', 'this', 'that', 'these', 'those', 'am', 'is', 'are', 'was', 'were', 'be', 'been', 'being', 'have', 'has', 'had', 'having', 'do', 'does', 'did', 'doing', 'a', 'an', 'the', 'and', 'but', 'if', 'or', 'because', 'as', 'until', 'while', 'of', 'at', 'by', 'for', 'with', 'about', 'against', 'between', 'into', 'through', 'during', 'before', 'after', 'above', 'below', 'to', 'from', 'up', 'down', 'in', 'out', 'on', 'off', 'over', 'under', 'again', 'further', 'then', 'once', 'here', 'there', 'when', 'where', 'why', 'how', 'all', 'any', 'both', 'each', 'few', 'more', 'most', 'other', 'some', 'such', 'no', 'nor', 'not', 'only', 'own', 'same', 'so', 'than', 'too', 'very', 's', 't', 'can', 'will', 'just', 'don', 'should', 'now']
+
+def remove_stopwords(input):
+	word_list = input.split(" ")
+
+	# remove stop words
+	modified_string = ' '.join([word.lower() for word in word_list if word.lower() not in get_stopwords()]) # remove stop words
+
+	# remove words within parens
+	modified_string = re.sub(r"\([^()]*\)", "", modified_string)
+
+	# remove special characters
+	modified_string =  re.sub(r'\W+', ' ', modified_string).strip()
+
+	return modified_string