Lexalytics Co-founder Reflects on 2 Decades of Pioneering AI and NLP Innovations

July 13, 2023 — In this retrospective, Lexalytics co-founder Jeff Catlin chronicles the company’s pioneering role in AI and NLP since 2003. Notable for commercializing sentiment analysis and syntax-focused machine learning, Lexalytics continues to impact diverse industries. Their recent acquisition by InMoment underscores their dedication to harnessing advances like BERT and GPT to enhance business strategies worldwide.

When Mike Marshall and I started Lexalytics back in 2003 as a content management startup, little did we know that the two of us would still be here all these years later. We’ve weathered the Great Recession and witnessed the rise of smartphones and social media, the emergence of cloud computing, the boom of ecommerce, and the magic of AI – and we’ve humbly played an active role in the way many businesses have navigated and benefited from these technological advancements throughout the years.

We’ve pioneered a number of industry firsts, including the first commercial sentiment analysis engine, the first Twitter/microblog-specific text analytics in 2010, the first semantic understanding based on Wikipedia in 2011, and the first unsupervised machine learning model for syntax analysis in 2014. And in 2021, we were acquired by leading CX provider InMoment, signaling an acknowledgement in the industry of the growing importance of AI and NLP in understanding and combining all forms of feedback and data.

While many of the developments in natural language processing (NLP) and text analytics have happened in research labs, universities, and R&D departments across the world, we’re proud to have commercialized many of them to help businesses make sense of their text data to drive a better understanding of their customers and what they want.

Given the significant progress made in deep learning and the emergence of powerful language models such as BERT and GPT in recent years, our aim is to continue helping businesses in leveraging these advancements across diverse industries and languages worldwide.

I also want to say a huge thank you to our entire team for doing all of the heavy lifting to get us to where we are today, and our customers for the privilege of being able to do this exciting work for the past 20 years. To the next 20!

Source: Jeff Catlin,