Programming Challenge: Emotions Simulator

As a part of my learning of AI, I've decided that one of the things I want to make is a human-emotion simulation. The project would have a bunch of different steps that I can currently think of (and the following is a butchering of the concept, for the purpose of explanation.

• Sentence recognition: Understanding the subject and verb of the sentence, as well as key emotional words. The sentences would have to be simple, to start.
• Understanding the point behind the sentence: if the verb was "am/is", then what are they? Why is that? Did they ever explain why that is?
• Coming up with a response: it'd have to be stock responses at first, simply because the emotions wouldn't be in place, yet.

In tandem, I'd have to simulate the emotions. There's two ways I'm thinking about doing this:

• Looking into the chemicals in the brain, and what emotion relies on what chemical, then what causes each chemical to change
• Or, just going from emotion to emotion.

Ideally, I'd do the former, because that would allow for much nicer emotion to emotion transition, as well, as in-between emotions (much like humans actually have).

Once that was in place, I'd have to edit the dialogue responses, making responses vary based on the emotion. This means I'd also have to look into AI sentence forming. Gonna be honest, I have no idea where to start there.

That's a basic outline of the plan. Let's hope this works out!