Funny, I just wrote about this yesterday -
Text analytics is an important idea and this gives us a good on-ramp to complain about the lack of API methods concerning text objects in sections. Ideally, we should be able to access text much the way we access data in the API. With the API complaint on the table, let’s focus on what can be done today.
Export Text, Analyze, Update Table
This approach, while simple, is not theoretical; I have two clients using this exact approach to perform certain NLP processing. It does require some extensive development effort, however.
Imagine you set up a Coda action that exports a section via the Gmail pack every two hours. The Gmail account (using Google Apps Script) sees the exported section content, parses it as plain text, and then performs the text analysis in Javascript or with the help of AI tools such as Dialog Flow. With the text analytics in hand, the same process writes the data back into the Coda Doc as data in a table. It’s a quick, sustainable integration process that runs silently to maintain text analytics in the Coda document.
Your requirements suggest the need for text analytics across multiple documents and this approach supports this idea because the API has access at the document level. It’s not unlike building a full-text search index across a collection of documents where you need to search for terms in both the text within sections as well as table rows and fields.
Coda-based Formulas and Filters
This [hypothetical] approach would be ideal (because it’s self-contained) but there are likely some challenges. I’ll bet someone like @Paul_Danyliuk has actually thought about this or has some ideas about it.
Text Analytics Pack?
If given the opportunity (i.e., pack development is made possible by Makers), this is one of the first packs I would develop myself. It seems that the Pack architecture is perfectly suited for this type of a plugin.