Traditional event extraction systems focus mainly on event type identifi cation and event participant extraction based on pre-specifi ed event type paradigms and manually annotated corpora. However, different domains have different event type paradigms. When transferring to a new domain, we have to build a new event type paradigm and annotate a new corpus from scratch. This kind of conventional event extraction system requires massive human effort, and hence prevents event extraction from being widely applicable. In this paper, we present BUEES, a bottom-up event extraction system, which extracts events from the web in a completely unsupervised way. The system automatically builds an event type paradigm in the input corpus, and then proceeds to extract a large number of instance pattes of these events. Subsequently, the system extracts event arguments according to these pattes. By conducting a series of experiments, we demonstrate the good performance of BUEES and compare it to a state-of-the-art Chinese event extraction system, i.e., a supervised event extraction system. Experimental results show that BUEES performs comparably (5% higher F-measure in event type identifi cation and 3% higher F-measure in event argument extraction), but without any human effort.