It’s difficult to say what it means “to understand meaning of a text”, but everyone will say that people can do this, and computers do not. Natural language understanding is one of the tough problems in Artificial Intelligence. How to capture the semantics of the sentence
Traditionally there were two opposite approaches to the problem. The first one goes like this: start from the definitions of separate words, hard-code the relations between them, and write down the sentence structures. If you are persistent enough, hopefully you will end up with a complex model that will incorporate enough expert knowledge to parse some natural questions and produce meaningful answers. And then, you'll find out that for a new language, you need to start everything over.
That's why many researchers turned to the opposite approach...
