Political Science: KEDS—A Program for the Machine Coding of Event Data

This paper describes in technical detail the Kansas Event Data System ( KEDS) and summarizes our experience in coding Reuters data for the Middle East. The components of KEDS are first described; this discussion is intended to provide sufficient detail about the program that one could develop a more sophisticated machine-coding system based on our research. We then discuss a number of problems we have encountered in machine coding, focusing on the Reuters data source and the KEDS program itself. The paper concludes with a discussion of future approaches to machine coding in event data research and other potential applications of the technology. Keywords. event data, natural language, full-text databases, international relations, social science.