This paper presents an overview of a theory of discourse structure, and discusses a model for assimilating text into a frame-based data structure. The model has been applied to the analysis of news articles. The theory assumes sentences contain links to the database which are relatively easy to compute. These links point to prior themes which contain expectations and procedural knowledge. This knowledge is used to assimilate new sentences to these themes. At any given time, only procedural knowledge from the indicated theme is active in processing new sentences.
