Slides for talk given at Women in Engineering on March 20, 2021. Abstract: Natural language understanding is a fundamental task in artificial intelligence. English understanding has reached a mature state and successfully deployed in multiple IBM AI products and services, such as Watson Natural Language Understanding and Watson Discovery. However, scaling existing products/services to support additional languages remain an open challenge. In this talk, we will discuss the open challenges in supporting universal natural language understanding. We will share our work in the past few years in addressing these challenges. We will also showcase how universal semantic representation of natural languages can enable cross-lingual information extraction in concrete domains (e.g. compliance) and show ongoing efforts towards seamless scaling existing NLP capabilities across languages with minimal efforts.