Text analysis quickly brings up regex and Perl as an obvious choice. It is how I started using perl many years ago.

Being interested in text parsing, I asked the monks whether there existed language regex collections (see NLP - natural language regex-collections?). Such collections do not seem to exist. I still don't know whether this is out of lack of interest, or lack of possibility. I hope it is the former, so I will be able to do it myself ;)

Also, interest is not the same as expertise, and in this specific subject (Linguistic Computing) even expertise may only be 'promising' (as opposed to delivering). I hope I'm wrong.