Help with Text Adventure centered Theory (i.e parsers, dialogue trees, etc)

[DoctorSalt]

Hey, so I've been working on little programming projects over my first year of college. Mostly C#/java stuff. A friend of mine back home is a writer and I suggested we collaborate on a project for the summer.
We had in mind a text based adventure game with a focus on fun dialogue and variety on choice (in a really limited context).
Now, I'm having a hard time researching how big I want this to be because I don't know what questions to ask. Do you know of any good sources that explains concepts of designing dialogue systems, or ones that explain parsing of strings in a context I can understand?

Currently looking through: gamedev.com, gamasutra.com, google and [url]http://roguebasin.roguelikedevelopment.org/index.php?title=Main_Page[/url]

EDIT: Google searches seem to agree that using a 'text adventure' centered language like inform 6/7 is a good idea. I totally agree with not reinventing the wheel but do you think it is worth it?

[meanwhile]

Roguebasin is the best I know. Gotta love that site.

[supersnail11]

If you want to write a choice-based text adventure, choice script would be the way to go.

For Zork-like text adventures, Inform is pretty much the standard. Inform 7 has a nice IDE:

[img]http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/1a/Inform_7_code_and_skein.png/800px-Inform_7_code_and_skein.png[/img]