Traditional event detection classifies a word or a phrase in a given sentence for a set of prede- fined event types. The limitation of such pre- defined set is that it prevents the adaptation of the event detection models to new event types. We study a novel formulation of event detec- tion that describes types via several keywords to match the contexts in documents. This fa- cilitates the operation of the models to new types. We introduce a novel feature-based attention mechanism for convolutional neural networks for event detection in the new for- mulation. Our extensive experiments demon- strate the benefits of the new formulation for new type extension for event detection as well as the proposed attention mechanism for this problem