In many disciplines in the social sciences and humanities, research is increasingly dealing with large scale text corpora that require the use of advanced NLP tools to process them and extract information. However, to date, most existing algorithms focus on the topical organization (e.g., bag-of-words based LDA) and relatively simple grammatical (e.g., subjects and objects of the discussion, adverbials of place, time, etc.) and semantic structures (e.g., sentiment) of the text, while more complex meanings remain difficult to extract. This talk introduces the EU-funded research project INFOCORE’s strategy to algorithmically detecting calls for action, and discusses the involved challenges, available tools and further developments in the case of conflict discourse. At the same time, it sets out a more general approach to integrating existing algorithms to enable the detection of implicit, more complex semantic structures.