Rodgerdev/swahili-news-nlp

As a team of data scientists, we developed a Swahili news classification model using NLP techniques. We explored multiple deep learning approaches, including LSTM and BiLSTM, and ultimately achieved the best performance with a BERT-based model. This project demonstrates the power of NLP in low-resource languages. # Swahili news classification model on NLP ## Project Overview News media plays a crucial role in shaping public opinion, informing societies, and influencing political and social discourse. In East Africa, Swahili is one of the most widely spoken languages, serving as a unifying medium for news dissemination across multiple countries, including Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, and the Democratic Republic of Congo. With the rise of digital journalism, there has been a rapid increase in Swahili news content, necessitating the need for automated classification of Swahili news articles. This project aims to leverage Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Deep Learning to develop a model that can accurately categorize Swahili news content into predefined categories ## Business Understanding The growing volume of Swahili-language news presents a challenge for media organizations in managing, organizing, and delivering relevant content efficiently. Manual classification is labor-intensive, time-consuming, and prone to inconsistencies, leading to inefficiencies in news dissemination. To address this, automated categorization using Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Deep Learning offers a scalable and reliable solution. By leveraging these technologies, news platforms, media houses, and content aggregators can streamline content management, enhance searchability, and improve audience engagement. ## Objectives Automating News Classification. How can we efficiently categorize Swahili news articles using machine learning and deep learning? Understanding Media Trends. What are the most common news topics in East African media? Are there any biases in media coverage based on classification trends? Enhancing Content Accessibility. How can automated classification improve information retrieval for journalists, policymakers, and the general public? ## Data Understanding ### Overview This dataset consists of Swahili news articles categorized into different top …