国際関係論

全然ＩＲ（国際関係論）とは関係ない生活をしているのですが、上の学年からKKVでおなじみのGary Kingからのメールが転送されてきたので、貼っておきます。国際関係論専攻で計量のできる人*1には役立つかも。

-------------- Forwarded Message: --------------
I thought you might be interested in a newly updated dataset of almost
 10 million individually coded international events (1990-2004). Each 
event is summarized in the data as "Actor A does something to Actor B", 
with Actors A and B coded for about 450 countries (and other actors) and 
"does something to" coded in an ontology of about 200 types of actions. 
The data are coded by a computer "reading" millions of Reuters news 
reports. Will Lowe and I wrote an article* that evaluated the software 
system (produced by VRA) that performs this task and found that for the 
numbers of events it was possible to convince humans (trained Harvard 
undergraduates) to coded by hand, the machine did as well as the humans. 
However, in part since there is only so much pizza you can feed 
undergraduates, the machine clearly dominates for larger numbers of
events. We previously released a dataset with 3.5 million events; this 
one is bigger, more accurate (since the software has been improved), and 
covers a longer time period.

Most international relations data are limited to analyses aggregated to 
the year or month. Yet, as we say in the article, when the Palestinians 
launch a mortar attack into Israel, the Israeli army does not wait until 
the end of the calendar year to react. We think there is much to be 
learned about international relations from data like these.

For the data, documentation, and our article, see

http://gking.harvard.edu/events/

Gary

*Gary King and Will Lowe. 2003. "An Automated Information Extraction
Tool For International Conflict Data with Performance as Good as Human
Coders: A Rare Events Evaluation Design" International
Organization, 57, 3 (July, 2003): Pp. 617-642.

*1:なんか絞られるなー。