“In fact, topic tagging at various semantic resolutions is a gateway solution approach to NLU for two reasons: (1) Text classification into topics is a precursor to most higher level NLU tasks such as sentiment detection, discourse analysis, episodic memory, and even question answering (the quintessential NLU task) (2) Also, NLP pipelines are considerably prone to error propagation, i.e. an error in topic classification can jeopardize future analysis, such as episodic memory modeling or discourse or even sentiment analysis. Thus, finding the right topic is crucial for NLU.”