DescribeEvents/gdelt_news_events

GDELT News Events

Curated geopolitical event sequences from the GDELT 2.0 Event Database, designed for temporal point process (TPP) and marked temporal point process (MTPP) modeling. Each sequence tracks interactions between a country pair (e.g., USA–Russia) over time, where the prediction target is the CAMEO event type of each geopolitical development.

Dataset Description

• —Source: GDELT Project
• —Time range: 2022–2024
• —Grouping: Events grouped by country pair (e.g., USA–Russia, China–Japan)
• —Sequences: 179
• —Sequence length: 40–100 events per sequence
• —Time unit: days
• —Daily aggregation: One event per day per pair (NumMentions-weighted mean Goldstein selection)
• —Coherence filters: Acronym allowlist for title-casing, known group name override (NATO/UN/EU), multi-role actor combining, BUS actor exclusion, MED/EDU conflict exclusion, armed conflict plausibility checks, Goldstein swing ratio filter

Schema

Each record is a dictionary with 10 fields:

Event Types (7 types from 20 CAMEO codes, ~99 base-code verbs)

20 CAMEO root codes are merged into 7 action-based types. Each event uses a specific verb from ~99 CAMEO base codes (3-digit EventBaseCode) for precise action descriptions, falling back to 20 root-level verbs when the base code is unavailable:

Type Categories (QuadClass)

Each event also carries a QuadClass category: Verbal Cooperation, Material Cooperation, Verbal Conflict, or Material Conflict. The sequence-level type_category field stores the dominant category for the sequence.

Curation Filters

Event Text

Each event's type_text is a concise sentence: actor1 + action verb + actor2. Built from structured GDELT fields (actor names, roles, countries) — no headline scraping. Known organizations (NATO, UN, EU) use proper names via KnownGroupCode lookup, and multi-role actors combine types (e.g. "government and military forces"):

government and military officials from United States engaged in formal negotiations with Russia.

NATO cooperated militarily with United States.

Russia imposed an embargo or sanctions on Ukraine.

Example

{
  "seq_idx": 0,
  "seq_len": 100,
  "type_category": "Verbal Cooperation",
  "span_days": 153.0,
  "description": "Geopolitical event timeline between United Kingdom and United States, 2024...",
  "metadata": "{\"country_pair\": [\"GBR\", \"USA\"], \"country_names\": [\"United Kingdom\", \"United States\"], ...}",
  "time_since_start": [0.0, 1.0, 2.0, ...],
  "time_since_last_event": [0.0, 1.0, 1.0, ...],
  "type_event": ["coercion", "disapproval", "diplomatic_engagement", ...],
  "type_text": ["United States imposed an embargo or sanctions on United Kingdom.", ...]
}

Intended Use

• —Training and evaluating temporal point process models
• —Studying geopolitical interaction patterns between country pairs
• —Benchmarking next-event prediction and event forecasting
• —Modeling marked temporal point processes with rich text marks

Citation

If you use this dataset, please cite:

@dataset{gdelt_news_events_2025,
  title={GDELT News Events},
  author={XiaoBB},
  year={2025},
  url={https://huggingface.co/datasets/XiaoBB/gdelt_news_events},
  note={Curated from GDELT 2.0 Event Database, 2022-2024}
}