thank for your links!
generally speaking, I can&#x27;t agree with your first statement :) and I anticipated my ignorance in linguistic topics :)<p>I&#x27;ll investigate and study to understand about &quot;pragmatic&quot; and semantic understanding; thanks.<p>But let me do some more notes:<p>1. my raugh and crippled code proposal at <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.github.com&#x2F;solyaris&#x2F;dialogs" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.github.com&#x2F;solyaris&#x2F;dialogs</a> is to consider a &quot;framework&quot; where dialog are composed&#x2F;nested as &quot;elemental dialogs&quot; (archetypes or &quot;abstract classes&quot;) to be instantiated as subclasses, and of course there is not a real NLP. 
The semantic understanding is &quot;delegated&quot; to an external engine (see the interpret() method).<p>2. In my modest opinion the BIG trade off is between a system that really do a semantic interpretation and a system tha quickly supply a service to a user (buyer) in a DETERMINISTIC&#x2F;fast workflow.<p>Please let consider the usual example I propose: an ecommerce shopping: I call this a bussines service, that &quot;have to&quot; bring user to purchase something as goal, &quot;as talking by phone&quot; with the buyer (BTW I worked a bit on a proximity ecommerce project <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.rosposhop.com" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.rosposhop.com</a>, where buyer and seller live in the same area and know each other personally).<p>So the state-machines composistion I proposed is maybe naif but focus on a deterministic workflow, to achive some business goal&#x2F;task.<p>To be pragmaticals:
There is some (open-source) NLP to already done to realize a &quot;simple&quot; task as a &quot;ecommerce&quot; text conversation&quot; ? 
I&#x27;m looking forward for it :)<p>giorgio