Extracting events from text is one of the key research themes in natural language processing. This process includes several tasks such as event detection, entity extraction, and argument extraction. As one of the most important topics in natural language processing, the applications of event extraction span across a wide range of domains such as newswire, biomedical domain, history and humanity, and cyber security. This report presents a comprehensive survey for event detection from textual documents. In this report, we provide the task definition, the evaluation method, as well as the benchmark datasets and a taxonomy of methodologies for event extraction. We also present our vision of future research directions in event detection.