Fine-tuning LLMs for Amharic NER to extract product information from Telegram e-commerce channels
# Amharic E-commerce Data Extractor Named Entity Recognition (NER) System
A transformer-based NER system to extract products, prices, and locations from Ethiopian Telegram e-commerce channels for EthioMart's centralized platform.
## Project Overview
This project, developed as part of the **10 Academy Artificial Intelligence Mastery** (18 June - 24 June 2025), builds an **Amharic E-commerce Data Extractor** to transform unstructured Telegram posts into a structured FinTech engine for EthioMart. The system extracts key entities (Product, Price, Location) from Amharic text in Ethiopian e-commerce Telegram channels, enabling a centralized platform for product discovery and vendor analysis for micro-lending.
## Business Need
EthioMart aims to consolidate decentralized Telegram-based e-commerce activities in Ethiopia into a unified platform. By extracting structured data from Telegram posts, the system enables:
- Seamless customer interaction with multiple vendors.
- A centralized database of products, prices, and locations.
- A FinTech engine to identify promising vendors for micro-lending based on engagement metrics.
## Objectives
1. Develop a repeatable workflow for data ingestion, preprocessing, and entity extraction.
2. Fine-tune a transformer-based model for Amharic NER with high F1-score accuracy.
3. Compare multiple NER models and recommend the best for EthioMart’s use case.
4. Use SHAP and LIME for model interpretability to ensure transparency.
5. Create a vendor scorecard to rank vendors for micro-lending based on activity and engagement.
## Repository Structure
```
Amharic-Ecommerce-Extractor/
├── data/
│ ├── raw/ # Raw Telegram data (CSV/JSON)
│ ├── processed/ # Preprocessed data and CoNLL files
│ └── vendor_scorecard.csv # Final vendor scorecard
├── notebooks/
│ ├── task1_data_ingestion.ipynb # Data scraping and preprocessing
│ ├── task2_data_labeling.ipynb # CoNLL format labeling
│ ├── t …