This project automates the extraction of key business entities (products, prices, locations etc) from Amharic Telegram e-commerce channels. It powers EthioMart's centralized marketplace and identifies top vendors for microloans using AI. It includes data preprocessing, model training, and SHAP/LIME interpretability.
# EthioMart | Amharic E-commerce Data Extractor
## π Project Overview
EthioMart aims to become the primary hub for Telegram-based e-commerce in Ethiopia by centralizing real-time data from various channels. This project focuses on building an Amharic Named Entity Recognition (NER) system to extract key business entities (product names, prices, locations, contacts) from Telegram messages and images. The extracted data will populate EthioMart's centralized database, enabling a seamless experience for customers and informing FinTech initiatives like vendor loan assessments.
This project leverages Python, Telegram API, and data science tools to build a robust data pipeline, from scraping and preprocessing to model fine-tuning and interpretability.
## ποΈ 1. Project Setup, Data Collection and Preprocessing
**Deliverables:**
* GitHub code for Task 1 (data ingestion and preprocessing).
* Data summary (1-2 pages) covering data preparation and labeling steps.
### Repo/Project Structure
```bash
EthioMart/
βββ src/
β βββ telegram_scraper.py # Collects raw data from Telegram channels
β βββ preprocessor.py # Cleans and preprocesses raw text data
β βββ data_labeler.py # Rule-based labeling for NER (Task 2)
β βββ model_finetuner.py # Fine-tunes NER models (Task 3 & 4)
βββ config/
β βββ config.py # Stores configuration variables (e.g., API credentials, channel list)
βββ data/
β βββ raw/ # Stores raw scraped data (e.g., telegram_data.csv)
β β βββ telegram_data.csv
β βββ processed/ # Stores cleaned and preprocessed data
β β βββ clean_telegram_data.csv
β βββ labeled/ # Stores manually and semi-automatically labeled data
β βββ telegram_ner_data_rule_based.conll
βββ models/ # Stores fine-tuned NER models (Task 3 & 4)
β βββ afro_xlmr_ner_fine_tuned/
βββ photos/ # Stores downloaded images from Telegram messages
βββ notebooks/ # Jupyter notebooks for EDA β¦