Last update: 3. October 2023

The following four/two programs now form an own group, because all of them analyse text with the goal of examining events: Ethno/ESA and KEDS/Tabari.

program: Ethno
author and distributor: David Heise

documentation: short manual
download: free
operating system: MS-DOS
description: see ESA

program: ESA - Event Structure Analysis
author and distributor: David Heise

documentation: tutorial
download: free
operating system: JAVA
description: ESA is an on-line Java program that helps you analyse sequential events. Prerequisite analysis produces a diagram showing how some events are necessary for other events, and how abstract events are represented in concrete happenings. You can test whether the diagram works as a grammar explaining the sequence of events. Composition analysis involves coding agent, action, object, instrument, setting, alignment, product, and beneficiary of each event. This lets you determine how people, things, and actions were linked by the events.

program: KEDS 0.9
author and distributor: Philip A. Schrodt

documentation: not available
download: link does not work, no need link is available (needs StuffIt expander)
operating system: Mac OS 6.0 or better
description: The Kansas Event Data System (KEDS) is a program for the machine coding of international event data using pattern recognition and simple grammatical parsing. It is designed to work with short news articles such as those found in wire service reports or chronologies. To date, KEDS has primarily been used to code WEIS events from Reuters wire service lead sentences but in principle it can be used for other event coding schemes. There is also an e-mail list.

The links have been changed since the last update, the new pages do not contain the same information as the old ones.

program: Tabari 0.8.4b3
author and distributor: Philip A. Schrodt
documentation: tabari manual
download: freeware
operating systems: MacOS, Linux
description: see KEDS. Tabari is an open-source project, the C++ code is provided for the GCC compiler. One has to build the executable code oneself, all instructions are given on the website.