For the most part they aren't successful because the "AI" isn't smart enough to have a goal in mind, so they end up just monkey-cheesing everything. Pasting together snippets in ways that are usually grammatically correct but make no sense.
Part of this is "underlying meaning" is an intuitive way to describe things but whatever is underlying here is more tenuous than a classical logic/GOFAI model of the world but more "solid" than a long, clever stream of associations.
Let's say we have a goal, "evaluate persons impression of a particular book/topic/etc".
So the goal would be to have a conversation on this and related topics that would (re)construct person's impression.
Hence my question if there are any publications/articles that explored that?