I'm a researcher in the field. Not in NLP anymore, but I worked on that as well, years ago, and I keep up with the research. You can't "understand the context" of "War and Peace" unless you have real, actual AGI. I doubt actually it can be fully understood at all when translated to English and read by someone without the right cultural background. This is an extreme example, chosen to make it easy to see that it applies to any non-trivial text.

Let's take a question answering example. Take just about any recent deep learning paper and try to answer detailed, higher level questions against it. To use a concrete example, take MobileNet V3 paper and ask your system "do I put activation before or after squeeze and excitation" (correct answer is "before"), or "do I need a bias in squeeze and excitation module" (correct answer is "it depends on the task"). You won't be able to, because a lot of things are just _assumed_, just like in any other realistic example of text written for human consumption. The facts are encoded externally as information about the world, and they're so fine grained and contextual, that we don't even know how to begin incorporating them into the answers, let alone do so contextually and probabilistically, like human mind does.