  Events of various kinds are mentioned and discussed in text documents,
whether they are books, news articles, blogs or microblog feeds. The paper
starts by giving an overview of how events are treated in linguistics and
philosophy. We follow this discussion by surveying how events and associated
information are handled in computationally. In particular, we look at how
textual documents can be mined to extract events and ancillary information.
These days, it is mostly through the application of various machine learning
techniques. We also discuss applications of event detection and extraction
systems, particularly in summarization, in the medical domain and in the
context of Twitter posts. We end the paper with a discussion of challenges and
future directions.
