# Multilingual Symptom Extraction (English + Amharic)
## Model Description
This model is a fine-tuned **XLM-R-base** model for extracting symptoms from patient-generated texts in **English and Amharic**. It was developed as part of an MSc thesis at the Technical University of Munich, aiming to support AI-powered symptom extraction platforms in multilingual healthcare settings.
The model performs **Named Entity Recognition (NER)** to identify symptom mentions in unstructured texts using the **BIO tagging scheme**.
## Intended Uses & Limitations
**Intended uses:**
- Automatic symptom extraction from patient-generated texts in English and Amharic.
- Research in multilingual biomedical NLP.
- Integration into AI diagnostic platforms for low-resource languages.
**Limitations:**
- Trained only on the datasets described in the thesis; performance on other domains may vary.
- Not validated for real-world clinical deployment without further testing and ethical approval.
## Training Data
- Unlabeled **English, Amharic, and Tigrinya** corpora collected from diverse sources for domain adaptation.
- A combination of publicly available datasets and synthetically generated data, which were then labeled for fine-tuning.
- Preprocessed with tokenization, normalization, and **Doccano BIO tagging**.
## Evaluation
- **Metrics:** Precision, Recall, F1-score for symptom extraction.
- Results and detailed evaluation are described in the MSc thesis:
> Negash Desalegn. (2025). *Bridging the Linguistic Gap in Healthcare: A Multilingual AI Approach for Symptom Extraction in Low-Resource Languages*. Technical University of Munich.