Language Parsing and AI-Where are we now?

C-Town asks: "Browsing through the Slashdot articles to research Artificial Intelligence, the Artificial Intelligence IRC Bot contest came up and it brought me to think.. How far have we gotten in AI technology in terms of language/text parsing? How long will it be before Ask Jeeves will start working so well that it could replace all pattern matching and neural networking based searches? Instead of giving me categories when I submit a query, return to me abstracts (not hand entered but abstracts generated by the ai engine, that describes the article in context of the search query, when the match is made) of the documents on the web with their respective links? I know Autonomy currenlty have a product out to improve data mining and they route customer service emails with what they call "high performance pattern matching algorithms" (I think it's neural networking?) but they're still not able to analyze whole documents in a lexical manner. What companies/research institutes are currently working on this? Imagine being able to search through all /. comments with a question like "Who makes the best Linux Laptops" and get great results. I can imagine this to stop spam eventually too! "