# EthioMart Vendor Analytics & Micro-Lending Scorecard
### Project Overview
#### This project aims to:
- Scrape and preprocess Ethiopian e-commerce Telegram messages.
- Extract key business entities (products, prices, locations) using a fine-tuned NER model.
- Analyze vendor performance based on engagement metrics (views, post frequency, pricing).
- Generate a lending scorecard to help EthioMart identify high-potential vendors for micro-loans.
#### Tasks Breakdown
##### π Task 1: Data Ingestion & Preprocessing
Objective: Fetch and preprocess Telegram messages for NER training.
Steps:
β
Scrape Telegram Channels
Use telethon or pyrogram to collect messages from 5+ Ethiopian e-commerce channels.
Store raw data (text, images, metadata) in a structured format (CSV/JSON).
β
Preprocess Text Data
Normalize Amharic text (remove emojis, special chars).
Tokenize messages for NER labeling.
Extract metadata: [vendor_name, timestamp, views].
π Output:
raw_data/ (raw scraped messages)
processed_data.csv (structured, cleaned data)
##### Task 2: Label Dataset in CoNLL Format
Objective: Manually annotate 30-50 messages for NER training.
Steps:
β
Label Entities:
B-Product, I-Product (e.g., αα₯α΅, αΈαα)
B-PRICE, I-PRICE (e.g., 1000 α₯α)
B-LOC, I-LOC (e.g., Addis Ababa, Bole)
π Output:
ner_labels.conll (annotated dataset in CoNLL format)
##### Task 3: Fine-Tune NER Model
Objective: Train a model to extract products, prices, and locations.
Steps:
β
Setup Environment (Google Colab GPU)
python
!pip install transformers datasets seqeval
β
Load & Tokenize Data
Use HuggingFace Datasets to load ner_labels.conll.
Tokenize with XLM-Roberta or bert-tiny-amharic.
β
Train Model
Fine-tune using Trainer API (5-10 epochs).
Evaluate on validation set (F1-score, precision, recall).
π Output:
saved_model/ (fine-tuned NER model)
eval_results.txt (performance metrics)
##### Task 4: Model Comparison & Selection
Objective: Compare models (XLM-Roberta, mBERT, DistilBERT) and pick the β¦