Text Analysis InternationalMakers of VisualText & NLP++ · 1998–2018

About us

Our history

Text Analysis International, Inc. (TextAI) was founded in 1998 to bring a new, practical approach to analyzing electronic text to market. Its main product, VisualText, came out of years of research and development in natural language processing.

Timeline

  1. 1982–1987 · UC Irvine Amnon Meyers develops a knowledge representation framework and uses it to build VOX (Vocabulary Extension System) under contract to the Navy and DARPA. VOX helped inspire DARPA's Message Understanding Conferences (MUC).
  2. 1988–1993 · McDonnell Douglas Amnon Meyers and David de Hilster build TexUS, a text understanding system.
  3. 1993–1998 · TRW Together they build DEFT (Data Extraction From Text) for the InfoWeb document management system.
  4. 1998 · Text Analysis International The company is founded to commercialize VisualText, an IDE for building text analyzers, and NLP++, its programming language for grammars, patterns and knowledge.
  5. 2000s · VisualText 2 Professional VisualText is used to build resume analyzers, web-page categorizers, focused web crawlers, chat and email analyzers. The Professional edition is released free for non-commercial use, alongside the TAIParse English analyzer.
  6. 2018 · Open source Text Analysis International closes its doors. VisualText and NLP++ are released as open source and continue at visualtext.org.
  7. Today NLP++ runs in Visual Studio Code, is used at universities around the world, and is the subject of the book Rule-Based NLP with NLP++.

The people

Amnon Meyers

Chief Technology Officer and Co-Founder

Over two decades of natural language processing work in aerospace and at universities. BS in Biology from MIT; MS degrees in Chemistry and Computer Science from UC Berkeley.

David de Hilster

Director and Co-Architect of VisualText

Senior engineer and scientist at I-Search, TRW, McDonnell Douglas and Battelle Memorial Institute, building practical NLP toolkits. BS in Mathematics and MA in Linguistics from Ohio State University.

Avi Meyers

Chief Executive Officer, President and Co-Founder

Entrepreneur who led several business ventures before co-founding TAI. BA in International Relations and MA in International Policy Studies from Stanford University.

Keith Woods-Holder

Chief Operating Officer

Former CTO of Glide Technologies, where he designed the MediaIntelligence platform for real-time sentiment analysis across broadcast and social media, acquired by NASDAQ OMX in 2011.

Contact

The company no longer operates, but the people behind VisualText are still around. Please get in touch through visualtext.org/contact.