banner-bg-min
35+ YEARS OF DESIGN, DEVELOPMENT, AND CONTINUOUS REFINEMENT
previous arrow
next arrow

OUR HISTORY

For more than three decades, we have seen text analysis as both a science and an art. It’s why we keep looking for new applications and new ways to give our customers more flexible, more user-friendly tools. As communication technology changes, we change with it — adapting and innovating. Below are the milestones that have shaped Provalis Research, from our latest releases all the way back to our founding in 1989.

  • 2026 – QDA Miner 2026 – Free, fully offline audio & video transcription (no usage limits, no cloud uploads — runs entirely on your machine with CPU/GPU acceleration), AI Document Analysis & Coding for long documents (builds a structured analytical framework applied consistently across the dataset), document-aware AI retrieval, and five new discourse-and-style analysis scripts measuring coherence, confidence, subjectivity, emotionality, and bias. (more details here)
  • 2025 – WordStat 2026 – Natural-language queries on frequencies, AI-assisted item selection in topic and phrase suggestions, expanded “Explain Relationship” prompt for AI-driven model validation, embedding-based phrase suggestions, and support for local SKOS and Turtle taxonomy files. (more details here)
  • ★ 2025 — Provalis introduces native Generative AI integration across the suite. A turning point in our history: WordStat 2025 and QDA Miner 2025 both ship with your choice of AI engine — six online options (OpenAI, Gemini, Claude, Mistral, Perplexity, DeepSeek) and one fully offline option (Ollama). Users get AI text retrieval through plain-language queries, AI coding of open-ended responses, AI-powered extraction and summarization of long documents, AI-enhanced topic naming and grouping, AI-based named entity classification, real-time token-usage monitoring, and full control over which engine is used and where data is sent.
  • 2024 – QDA Miner 2024 – New speaker-tag retrieval for automatic utterance coding in interview, focus-group, and debate transcripts; phrase frequency analysis with phrase clouds; circular dendrograms; custom co-occurrence and similarity matrices; and a new language identification model covering 68 languages with above 95% accuracy on short text segments.
  • 2024 – WordStat 2024 – Initial text processing up to 3× faster, especially on projects with many small documents; application of automatic document classification models for data transformation; the same 68-language detection model; advanced KWIC filtering on up to three criteria; and the ability to save retrieval results as a new project file with all preprocessing settings preserved.
  • 2023 – QDA Miner 2023 – New .pprj file format with full Unicode support (any human language, no Windows code-page workarounds), automatic synchronization for team coding projects (distribute, retrieve, merge, redistribute with one click), two methods for redacting confidential information (destructive and non-destructive), printing of documents with code marks and memos, and seamless export to Microsoft Power BI.
  • 2023 – WordStat 2023 – Topic enrichment 10–20× faster; phrase extraction 35× faster (50,000 customer reviews processed in 0.4s vs 14s); new 10-K and 10-Q financial filings importer for SEC analysis; Power BI export for interactive dashboards; topic-modeling word clouds, circular dendrograms, custom chart palettes, and inter-topic similarity tables.
  • 2023 – QDA Miner Lite 3.0 – Free qualitative data analysis software refreshed with the new Unicode-ready .qlt file format, fully importable into the commercial QDA Miner.
  • 2022 – WordStat 9.0.6 & QDA Miner 6.0.9 – Performance updates and new features across both flagship products. Notably in WordStat: a multithreaded factor analysis routine up to 65× faster for topic modeling, capacity raised from 3,000 to 10,000 words, and language-independent semantic suggestions for any thesaurus-less language.
  • 2021 – WordStat 9.0 – First full Unicode version with support for Asian languages, new automatic spelling corrections, ability to create Python and R pre- and post-processing scripts, etc. (more details here)
  • 2020 – QDA Miner 6.0 – New grid view mode for analyzing open-ended questions, quotation matrix, enhanced word clouds and memoing, support of Tableau, Lexis Nexis and Factiva, etc. (more details here)
  • 2018 – WordStat 8.0 – Standalone text mining platform with new explorer mode, improved topic modeling, new and improved graphic displays, and more.
  • 2017 – QDA Miner Lite 2.0.
  • 2016 – QDA Miner 5 – Import directly from emails, social media, and reference manager tools. GIS mapping tools.
  • 2015 – WordStat 7.1 Recognized as “Trend-Setting Product of 2016” by KM World Magazine.
  • 2015 – WordStat 7.1 for Stata – Seamless integration with STATA statistical analysis software.
  • 2015 – WordStat 7.1 – Geocoding feature and GIS mapping tool for unstructured text data.
  • 2014 – WordStat 7.0 – New topic modeling tool, link-analysis, improved linguistic resources, enhanced taxonomy development tools, and speed improvements.
  • 2013 – QDA Miner 4.1 and SimStat 2.6 – Projects are now stored in a single file, importation of folders, extraction of data from XML database files, and more.
  • 2013 – Provalis Research recognized as an industry leader by Hurwitz & Associates Victory Index.
  • 2012 – QDA Miner Lite – Free qualitative data analysis software.
  • 2011 – QDA Miner 4.0 – New text search tools based on machine learning and information retrieval techniques (i.e. cluster extraction, code similarity retrieval). Geo-referencing and time-tagging tool.
  • 2010 – WordStat 6.0 & WordStat 6.1 – New multilingual user interface (French & Spanish); integrated dictionaries and thesauruses for five languages to assist in the development of taxonomies; improved processing speed by 50%.
  • 2009 – QDA Miner 3.2 – New French and Spanish interface, virtual grouping of codes; bubble charts and improved bar charts; integrated statistical routine; new text-retrieval tools.
  • 2008 – QDA Miner 3.1 – Exportation of coded segments, drag-and-drop coding of retrieval results, and more.
  • 2007 – QDA Miner 3.0 – Coding of images; query-by-example; report manager; command log; highlighting or hiding coded text, etc.
  • 2006 – QDA Miner 2.0 – New hierarchical codebook system, exportation of projects to XML, new coding revision tools, code splitting and merging, new visualization tools; complex text search and retrieval strategies.
  • 2006 – WordStat 5.1 – Improved phrase extraction routine and visualization tools.
  • 2005 – WordStat 5.0 – More than 40 new features such as automatic document classification, improved text retrieval tool, proximity rules, creation of and comparison to normative frequency data, second-order co-occurrence profile analysis.
  • 2004 – QDA Miner 1.0 – First mixed-methods software, with clustering, multidimensional scaling, correspondence analysis, inter-coders agreement statistics.
  • 2003 – WordStat 4.0 – Lemmatization & stemming, heatmap, proximity plot, and new importation formats (XLS, HTML, etc.).
  • 2001 – WordStat 3.0 – First 32-bit version with correspondence analysis, overlapping categories, integration of WordNet, document conversion wizard, and more.
  • 1999 – WordStat 2.0 – Integration of thesaurus and dictionary building assistant.
  • 1998 – WordStat 1.0.
  • 1996 – SimStat 1.0 for Windows.
  • 1993 – SimStat 2.0 for DOS.
  • 1989 – Provalis Research is founded in Montreal by Normand Peladeau. The company’s first product, SimStat 1.0 for DOS, is released the same year.