This article discusses research on the machine coding of international event data from international and regional news sources using the Kansas Event Data System (KEDS). First, we suggest that the definition of an "event" should be modified so that events are explicitly and unambiguously defined in terms of natural language. Second, we discuss KEDS: a Macintoshbased machine coding system using pattern recognition and simple linguistic parsing to code events using the WEIS event categories. Third, we compare the Reuters international news service reports with those of two specialized regional sources: the foreign policy chronologies in the Journal of Palestine Studies and the German language biweekly publication Informationen. We conclude by noting that machine coding, when combined with the numerous sources of machine readable text that have become available in the past decade, has the potential to provide a much richer source of event data on international political interactions than that currently available. The ease of machine coding should encourage the creation of event coding schemes developed to address specific theoretical concerns; the increased density of these new data sets may allow the study of problems that could not be analyzed before.

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.