I wonder if there have ever been any articles, features, etc. about language processing in computer games (especially RPGs and adventure-games). Parsing-strategies, what kind of system to use(e.g. freetext - like in Wizardry, Infocom-text adventures, etc -, choosing from a range of possible sentences to say - like Baldur''s Gate, etc -, ...), whether or not NPCs should have a kind of memory, etc. Could anyone point me anywhere? Thanks, Dunk

The keyphrase you want to use is probably "natural language processing". There are lots of books on it, although I couldn''t comment on their quality. You might also want to look up "interactive fiction", which is what they call the Infocom-style games today. There are programs such as Inform and TADS which are for making interactive fiction with: but they include parser code and might give you some hints. (Personal opinion: TADS code is ugly beyond belief, unless you are the kind of person who loves C string pointer juggling.)