This question can probably be broken up into multiple questions, but here goes...

In essence, I'd like to allow users to type in what they would like to do and provide a wizard-like interface to ask for information which is missing to complete a requested query. For example, let's say a user types: "What is the weather like in Springfield?"

We recognize the user is interested in weather, but it could be Springfield, Il or Springfield in another state. A follow-up question would be:

What Springfield did you want weather for? 1 - Springfield, Il 2 - Springfield, Wi

You can probably think of a million examples where a request is missing key data or its ambiguous. Make the assumption the gist of what the user wants can be understood, but there are missing pieces of data required to complete the request.

Perhaps you can take it as far back as asking what the user wants to do and "leading" them to a query.

This is not AI in the sense of taking any input and truly understanding it. I'm not referring to having some way to hold a conversation with a user. It's about inferring what a user wants, checking to see if there is an applicable service to be provided, identifying the inputs needed and overlaying that on top of what's missing from the request, then asking the user for the remaining information. That's it! :-)

How would you want to store the information about services? How would you go about determining what was missing from the input data?

My thoughts: Use regex expressions to identify clear pieces of information. These will be matched to the parameters of a service. Figure out which parameters do not have matching data and look up the associated question for those parameters. Ask those questions and capture answers. Re-run the service passing in the newly captured data. These would be more free-form questions.

For multiple choice, identify the ambiguity and search for potential matches ranked in order of likelihood (add in user history/preferences to help decide). Provide the top 3 as choices.

Thoughts appreciated.

Cheers, Henry