The Language of Power and its Cultural Influence

In this paper, we investigate whether the social goals of an individual can be recognized through analysis of the social actions indicated by their use of language. Specifically, we focus on recognizing when someone is pursuing power within a web forum. Individuals pursue power in order to increase their control over the actions and goals of the group. We cast the problem as social conversational entailment where we determine if a dialogue entails a hypothesis which states a dialogue participant is in pursuit of power. In the social conversational entailment framework the hypothesis is decomposed into a series of social commitments which define series of actions and responses that are indicative of the hypothesis. The social commitments are modeled as social acts which are pragmatic speech acts. We identify nine culturally neutral psychologically-motivated social acts that can be detected in language and are indicative of whether an individual is pursuing power. Our best results using social conversational entailment achieve an overall F-measure of 79.7% for predicting pursuit of power for English speakers and 78.3% for Chinese speakers.