People have certainly worked on moving beyond sentence boundaries, although what is meant by understanding is always a bit nebulous. Certainly we need to make s

People have certainly worked on moving beyond sentence boundaries, although what is meant by understanding is always a bit nebulous. Certainly we need to make sure whatever process we are using has a sufficiently rich internal knowledge representation. One piece of work is this: https://github.com/chardmeier/docent/wiki https://github.com/chardmeier/docent/wiki which is a document level phrases-based statistical machine translation decoder. There have also been special purpose evaluation tasks which include correct pronoun resolution e.g. https://lindat.mff.cuni.cz/repository/xmlui/handle/11372/LRT-1611 https://lindat.mff.cuni.cz/repository/xmlui/handle/11372/LRT... . If you're interested, probably the DiscoMT workshops are a good starting point for some things people have tried.