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In this paper, we investigate whether the social goals of an individual's utterances can be recognized through analysis of a discourse's intentional structure. Specifically we focus on identifying individuals pursuing power within a group. Individuals pursue power in order to increase their control of the actions and goals of the group. Following work in discourse processing we decompose the problem into identifying the social intention of the discourse segments and the intentional structure of the overall discourse. The set of social intentions come from eight psychologically-motivated social acts. We then build a motif-based representation of the discourse's social intentional structure that captures the interactions of the intentions between discourse participants. Finally we show how these structures can be used to identify the social goal of pursuit of power. Our best results achieve an accuracy of 84.2% for predicting pursuit of power in discussions communicated in English and 80.6% for discussions communicated in Chinese. I. INTRODUCTIONUnderstanding discourse in the modern world of social media presents a plethora of new challenges. One central challenge for the community is advancing our understanding of the semantics and pragmatics of social media. Communication over social media often has more to do with the social implications of the utterance than its content. However, current computational approaches to understanding the semantics and pragmatics of discourse focus only on identifying the actions of individuals towards the dialogue through dialogue acts [1], [2], and examination of the information content of the dialogue through topical analysis [3], [4]. Instead, in this paper we focus on identifying the social pragmatics of a discourse and present a computational model of the social goals of discourse participants. In particular, we focus on identifying individuals that are pursuing power within an online community.As in the many discourse theories that converged on the importance of discourse cues for parsing the discourse structure of dialogues [5], [6], we claim that knowledge about social cues and their expression in language is central for recognizing social acts in communication and intentions in discourse. Recent advances in syntactic, semantic, and discourse processing allow us to contemplate the automatic processing of sociolinguistic-driven properties by identifying the language uses that capture the manifestations of social acts within discourse segments. As in other textual inference tasks, e.g. textual entailment [7] and conversation entailment [8], there are a variety of syntactic and semantic constructs that are helpful in recognizing the social implications of a dialogue.