Behavior and Events From News
The Behavior and Events from News
coding scheme is used with Profiler Plus to generate “event data” from an English
language news feed (typically BBC Monitoring). In development since January 2008,
BEN has been used successfully for an Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) project
and a Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) project.
Event Data
The BEN coding scheme is an enhancement to the Conflict and Mediation Event Observations
(CAMEO) coding scheme developed by the Kansas Event Data System Project in conjunction
with their research on third-party mediation. CAMEO organizes “event data” into
the following four general categories:
- Verbal Cooperation (ex: appeals for humanitarian aid)
- Material Cooperation (ex: delivery of humanitarian aid)
- Verbal Conflict (ex: threats and criticism)
- Material Conflict (ex: protests and arrests)
The primary question that BEN seeks to answer is
“who did what to whom where
and when?” BEN uses a grammatical connections component to tie all
verb subjects and objects to CAMEO events. This component works with both simple
and complex sentence structures including relative clauses, other dependent and
independent clauses, passive and active verb patterns, compound subjects and objects,
and connections to nouns as well as verbal phrases.
BEN can help you with your most challenging issues:
- Trend analysis – look at event data over time to spot trends in specific geographies
or specific events across geographies
- Decision making assistance – BEN can help your organization make better decisions
based on analysis of event data
- Prediction and planning support - Spot trends in build up of tension over time to
assist in prediction of potential unrest and allow for government response planning