Just starting out.. newbie help :)

Hello All,

I'm brand new to real AI and was wondering if those on the list who are
interested
in helping out a newbie could point me in the right direction as to what
I can read
to get me up to speed with AI.

To be more specific my interests lye in creating a pole / response
program which
can recognize human language and learn from its inputted data.

I've done this to an extent already but I'm sure that it is no where
near the correct
or proficient way. As is stands now my program can be polled and
responds by
recognizing one word from the input and searching a file for that word.

The file contains lines as such:  hi:::Hello how are you?

If there is an entry associated with that word it responds with the
corresponding
remainder after the :::'s.

Like I said I don't in any way believe that this is proficient. As a
mater of fact I
understand that it's the absolute wrong way to do it.

That's why I'm here :)

Can anyone help?

Brian Foy Jr.