Most anyone attempting to create AI has to be crazy. The complexity surrounding language and its use is a mind numbing thing to consider. There was a very good article in Harper's April 2001 called "Tense Present". I think what you are trying to accomplish really needs to be throughly broken down into the parts that make up languages, the more the better, and discern the commonality between them.

There are good articles on Perl for language parsing in TPJ. Fall 2000 and Summer 2000 jump to my mind immediately.

Take a look at the Lingua related modules to see what others have done.