These two aspects are strongly intertwined: on the one hand, enabling language-independent text understanding would allow for the harvesting of more knowledge in arbitrary languages, while, on the other hand, bringing together the lexical and semantic information available in different languages would improve the quality of text understanding in arbitrary languages.
these two goals have hitherto never been achieved, as is attested to by the fact that research in a core language understanding task such as Word Sense Disambiguation (Navigli, 2009, WSD) has always been focused mostly on English.