No Silver Bullet Essence and Accidents of Software Engineering: "the essence of the design without having to express large amounts of syntactic material that add no information content."
Why You Don't Need Proprietary Bot Software (A.L.I.C.E. AI Foundation): "Perhaps the most spectacular failure has been the CYC project, initiated by Doug Lenat in 1984 and beneficiary of millions of dollars of government research money and private and institutional investment. CYC (now housed under a company called Cycorp), was and is a project with the aim of building a giant knowledge base full of 'common sense', with the idea that this would someday enable machine understanding of texts. Lenat has been telling journalists (and presumably his investors) for years that CYC is mere months away from being able to understand simple texts like TIME magazine. So far quite a lot of money has been spent, and the giant knowledge base continues to grow, but despite its intricacy (some might say beauty), its commercial use is still beyond reach, and its theoretical base lags behind the academic research front, itself still light-years away from success.
Know this: the commercial bot companies may borrow bits and pieces from conventional NLP, but by and large they are every bit as ELIZA as ELIZA. As ELIZA relies on pattern-matching and simple string manipulation, so too do all 'proprietary' offerings at their core. "
