Military planners and other decision makers require advanced early warning of impending crises so they can devise effective mitigation plans, mobilize resources, and coordinate responses with their foreign counterparts. Over the last 40 years, the US government has invested generously in several attempts to build crisis forecasting systems that were analytically defensible and capable of processing and making sense of vast amounts of information in real or near real time. This article describes the most recent attempt by the US military to develop an Integrated Crisis Early Warning System (ICEWS). Although ICEWS relies heavily on social science theories, data, and methods, our experiences thus far reveal some strengths and limitations of contemporary quantitative approaches to addressing social science questions with real world implications. The article concludes with a sketch of a new paradigmatic approach—a Computational Social Science Experimentation Proving Ground—that could not only improve crisis early warning and response, but also revolutionize how social science knowledge is developed, evaluated, and applied more broadly.

Crisis Early Warning and Decision Support: Contemporary Approaches and Thoughts on Future Research

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 Macintosh-based 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.

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Machine coding of event data using regional and international sources

This paper is a study of the validity of a machine-coded event data series for six Middle Eastern actors and the United States. The series is based on Reuters newswire story leads coded into the WEIS categories. The face validity of the data is assessed by examining the monthly net cooperation scores based on Goldstein's (1992) scale in comparison to narrative accounts of the interactions between the actors; the event data series clearly shows the major patterns of political interaction. The machinecoded data are also compared to a human-coded WEIS data set based on the The New York Times and Los Angeles Times. Almost all dyads show a statistically significant correlation between the number of events reported by the two series, as well as the number of cooperative events. About half of the dyads show significant correlation in net cooperation and the number of conflictual events; many of these differences appear to be due to the higher density of events in Reuters. Finally, the machine-coded and WEIS data sets are used in two statistical time series studies and are shown to produce generally comparable results. Validity Assessment... 2

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Validity Assessment of a Machine-Coded Event Data Set for the Middle East, 1982-92

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.

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

The past decade has seen a renaissance in the development of political event data sets. This has been due to at least three sets of factors. First, there have been technological changes that have r...

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Precedents, Progress, and Prospects in Political Event Data

Research directed toward the development of user-oriented integrated crisis warning systems should incorporate quantitative military, political, and economic indicators for crisis warning; indicators of U.S. military, political and economic interests abroad; and a unified multi-method forecasting capability into an interactive computer base. Initial movement toward this goal has occurred in the development and testing of a first-stage prototype crisis warning system. Tests indicate that the prototype would have contributed to predictions of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia and the Indo-Pakistani war, and would enable analysts to track crisis and noncrisis events and conditions and to interact productively with a computer-based system. The second-stage prototype will continue to integrate, test, modify, and apply existing and ongoing research to the overall warning and management problem.

Toward the Development of an Integrated Crisis Warning System

This review essay applies academic and operational research community criteria of evaluation to a project founded on events/interaction data. The project, the Early Warning and Monitoring System (EWAMS), is built on solid academic research but also takes into account requirements of the operational community. Differences in form and content from typical academic events/interaction research have been instrumental in putting the EWAMS into operational use.

The use of events/interaction research by the intelligence community

Profiling States for Foreign Policy Analysis

Discussions about the “levels of analysis problem” have proliferated the field for almost two decades. In 1961, J. David Singer began the discussion in a now classic article. In response to Singer, analysts like Robert Isaak have attacked the Singer interpretation while many others have carelessly or obliviously skirted the issues surrounding the levels of analysis problem. Much of the confusion can be traced to a failure to view the importance of analytical levels in the aggregate analytical process and a failure to differentiate between causal and effectual levels of analysis. Causal levels of analysis are those whose variables or factors are antecedent to a particular behavior; effectual levels are those on which the behavior or phenomena in question actually occur, that is, on which the effect or result of the causal variables manifests itself. With reference to the aggregate analytical process, whenever scholars engage in inquiry they necessarily employ at least one causal and one effectual level of ...

The levels of analysis problems and the study of foreign international, and global affairs: A review critique, and another final solution

Many political scientists are not at all convinced that empirically verifiable generalizations about political behavior can ever be produced. There are thus many who believe that political scientists can never exert a significant impact upon the public policy-making process. Perhaps one way of narrowing the gap between the researcher and the policy-maker is to examine the public (foreign) policy decision-making process, pinpoint the leverage points within the process where social and political scientists (who engage in foreign policy analysis) might help, and then list the kinds and methods of analysis that would contribute the most to the process. The work of Harold D. Lasswell, James E. Anderson, E. S. Quade, William D. Coplin, and Charles F. Hermann can help us define the (foreign) policy-making process and locate the points at which scientific analysis can help the (foreign) policy-maker. The matching of these leverage points with types and instances of “relevant” analyses, as well as the methodologies necessary to carry out the analyses results in a matrix of decision tasks and research tasks which may be viewed as an agenda for the conduct of policy relevant research.

Stephen J. Andriole

Papers

Toward the Development of an Integrated Crisis Warning System

The use of events/interaction research by the intelligence community

Profiling States for Foreign Policy Analysis

The levels of analysis problems and the study of foreign international, and global affairs: A review critique, and another final solution

Decision process models and the needs of policy-makers: Thoughts on the foreign policy interface