discourse understanding

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discourse understanding The subproblem of natural-language processing of determining the meaning of a text or dialogue. Discourse understanding is a specialization of natural-language understanding in that it particularly addresses the problem of the meaning of utterances in the context of the whole text or dialogue, and with particular reference to how the discourse unfolds. In contrast, mainstream natural-language understanding typically takes no account of pragmatic setting and analyzes utterances in isolation from the text or dialogue in which they occur.