Understanding Language in Conversations "The problems addressed in discourse research aim to answer two general kinds of questions: (1) what information is contained in extended sequences of utterances that goes beyond the meaning of the individual utterances themselves? (2) how does the context in which an utterance is used affect the meaning of the individual utterances, or parts of them?"
– Barbara Grosz. Overview of Chapter 6: Discourse and Dialogue, Survey of the State of the Art in Human Language Technology (1996).