This paper presents an alternative event detection model based on the integration between the DistilBERT and a new meta-heuristic technique named the Hunger Games Search (HGS). The DistilBERT aims to extract features from the text dataset, while a binary version of HGS is developed as a feature selection (FS) approach, which aims to remove the irrelevant features from those extracted. To assess the developed model, a set of experiments are conducted using a set of real-world datasets. In addition, we compared the binary HGS with a set of well-known FS algorithms, as well as the state-of-the-art event detection models. The comparison results show that the proposed model is superior to other methods in terms of performance measures.