An Amharic NER system using fine-tuned Transformer models (BERT) to extract e-commerce data from Telegram for FinTech vendor analysis.
# B5W4: Amharic E-commerce Data Extractor for FinTech Analysis
An NLP system to extract structured data from Amharic e-commerce posts on Telegram and generate a "Vendor Scorecard" for FinTech analysis.
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## 1. Overview
EthioMart's vision is to become the primary hub for Telegram-based e-commerce in Ethiopia. Currently, the market is fragmented across numerous independent channels, creating a decentralized and inefficient experience for both vendors and customers. This project is the foundational phase in developing a centralized platform to solve this issue.
The primary objective is to build a robust Amharic Named Entity Recognition (NER) system that can automatically ingest, process, and extract structured business information from unstructured Telegram posts. This structured data is the key to creating a "Vendor Scorecard," a FinTech tool that will help EthioMart identify promising and reliable vendors for services like micro-lending and logistics partnerships.
### Key Features
- **Automated Data Ingestion:** Programmatically scrapes thousands of posts from public Amharic e-commerce Telegram channels.
- **Named Entity Recognition (NER):** Identifies and extracts key business entities like PRODUCT, PRICE, and LOCATION.
- **High-Quality Labeled Data:** Provides a manually annotated dataset in the standard CoNLL format, ready for model training.
- **Vendor Analytics Foundation:** The extracted data powers a "Vendor Scorecard" by analyzing product types, pricing strategies, post frequency, and market reach (via post views).
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## 2. Technology Stack
- **Data Ingestion:** Python, Telethon
- **Data Processing:** Pandas, NumPy
- **NLP Model:** Hugging Face Transformers (for fine-tuning models like XLM-Roberta, mBERT)
- **Data Annotation:** CoNLL (BIO) format
- **Development Environment:** Jupyter Notebooks, Python Virtual Environments
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## 3. Data Workflow & NER Model
The project follows a multi-stage data pipeline to transform raw, unstructured te …