Introducing the ICBe Dataset: Very High Recall and Precision Event Extraction from Narratives about International Crises

How do international crises unfold? We conceive of international affairs as a strategic chess game between adversaries, necessitating a systematic way to measure pieces, moves, and gambits accurately and consistently over different contexts and periods. We develop such a measurement strategy with an ontology of crisis actions and interactions and apply it to a high-quality corpus of crisis narratives recorded by the International Crisis Behavior (ICB) Project. We demonstrate that the ontology has high coverage over most of the thoughts, speech, and actions contained in these narratives and produces high inter-coder agreement when applied by human coders. We introduce a new crisis event dataset ICB Events (ICBe). We find that ICBe captures the process of a crisis with greater accuracy and granularity than other well-regarded events or crisis datasets. We make the data, replication material, and additional visualizations available at a companion website www.crisisevents.org.