A system and method for a real time, human-analogous natural language understanding engine (NLU Platform). The Platform understands natural language content in its full compositional context, is completely explainable and is effective with no or little training data. The invention utilizes a machine representation of natural language to enable human-analogous understanding by machines. The invention combines knowledge-based linguistics, discourse models, compositionality and the rhetorical structure in language. It can incorporate global knowledge about a concept to improve its representation and understanding. The platform does not rely on statistically derived distributional semantics and can be used for the complete range of natural language understanding tasks in the world. In one exemplary application, the NLU Platform can be used for automated knowledge acquisition or as an automated research engine for any topic or set of topics from one or more document repositories like the internet.