I am planning on undertaking a research project in my spare time involving automatically data mining and natural language generation.
The first thing to do is to learn Prolog thoroughly. Prolog has a number of interesting properties, among them that parsing is declarative, for free, making it even more effortless than combinator parsing in functional programming languages.
More posts will be forthcoming.
I was once overcome with an urge to rant about the relative merits of programming languages. I am done with this and hopefully it will be something that gets covered up in Google searches by more valuable contributions I leave in the Internet crumb trail anyone who actively participates in online discussion creates.