Text is one of the traditional ways of communication between people. With the growing availability of text data in electronic form, handling and analysis of text by means of computers gained popularity. Handling text data with machine learning methods brought interesting challenges to the area that got further extended by incorporation of some natural language specifics. As the methods were capable of addressing more complex problems related to text data, the expectations got bigger calling for a combination of methods from different research areas including information retrieval, machine learning, statistical data analysis, data mining, natural language processing, semantic technologies. Nowadays automatic text analysis is an integral part of many systems, pushing boundaries of research capabilities towards artificial intelligence dream on never ending learning from text aiming at mimicking ways of human learning. The paper presents development of text analysis research in Slovenian that we have been personally involved in, pointing out interesting research problems that have been and are still addressed by the research, example tasks that have been addressed and some challenges on the way.