I figured it out, and the issue was with the cleantext custom command packaged with NLP Text Analysis.  This command seems only to work with python2.  I suspected this and updated the cleantext stanza local/commands.conf with python.version = python2.  After restarting nothing changed. After further investigation it seems Splunk 8.0.x comes packaged with both python 3 and python 2, with python.version in default/server.conf set to python2.  In my case I had a value force_python3 value set in local/server.conf, which means that setting python.version anywhere else (like in local/commands.conf for the cleantext command) will be ignored.  I updated that value to python3, restarted, and everything started working. So I think NLP Text Analytics assumes that users leave the python.version value in default/server.conf as python2.  In my case that value was updated in local/server.conf which screwed everything up.  This might be written in the documentation somewhere, but I'm not going to lie: I didn't even check it... I hope this may clarify some things for others! ... View more