Discourse information analysis can mainly be divided into two categories, namely, discourse information unit analysis and discourse information element analysis. The former can be applied to analyze the information units used in different places and different procedures as well as the whole information net; the latter is applied for the further anatomy of information unit so as to explore the inner characteristics.

To be more specific, in information unit analysis, a discourse needs to be divided into information units as a start, and then each information unit be tagged with one of the 15Ws and information knots (which record the relationship of the father information and the son information). At this stage, the distribution of the discourse is explicit and the structure of the whole discourse is revealed. For instance, Chinese discourses are found to be spiral while English discourses to be linear. With information unit analysis, the result can be illustrated clearly and further variations can be explored as well. Such findings on characteristics in information unit are so powerful that they can be utilized to in authorship identification, speaker identification and surely to be more domains if we further explore in this direction.

Discourse information element analysis has been found to work prominently in the comparison of translations with the effort of DIA researchers. With discourse information element analysis, each information unit can be divided into various elements (each with a tag from the three categories- process, entity, and condition). The arrangement of information elements of different authors/languages can be illustrated clearly and a series of findings would be produced from the comparison consequently.