Most popular tools or programming language for academic text processing and nlp papers

I want to prototype and try some idea in the field of text processing and nlp and if the results is good, write some paper or journal article about that.

I am familiar with Weka, RapidMiner, Matlab and Python for text processing and nlp but I don't know what is the most popular tools for those fields in the academic area?

As I want to compare my method result's with the other one's I want to choose most popular tools or language for this work.

Sorry for my bad English.

Thanks for your attention.