Disclosed techniques relate to managing a dialogue between a user device and an autonomous agent. For instance, a computing device creates a discourse tree from a body of text that includes fragments. The discourse tree includes a root node, nonterminal nodes, and terminal nodes. Each nonterminal node represents a rhetorical relationship between two of the fragments and each terminal node is associated with one of the fragments. The computing device determines a main topic of the body of text from the discourse tree. The computing device provides the main topic to the user device, and in response, receives a user utterance. The computing device determines an intent from the user utterance and navigates the discourse tree to locate relevant information consistent with the intent.