AUTOMATED CODING OF INTERNATIONAL EVENT DATA USING SPARSE PARSING TECHNIQUES

“Event data” record the interactions of political actors reported in sources such as newspapers and news services; this type of data is widely used in research in international relations. Over the past ten years, there has been a shift from coding event data by humans—typically university students—to using computerized coding. The automated methods are dramatically faster, enabling data sets to be coded in real time, and provide far greater transparency and consistency than human coding. This paper reviews the experience of the Kansas Event Data System (KEDS) project in developing automated coding using “sparse parsing” machine coding methods, discusses a number of design decisions that were made in creating the program, and assesses features that would improve the effectiveness of these programs.

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