loverboy69

You're right, and you're wrong.

IAC owned both Match and HatchLabs (which developed Tinder in 2012). They were later merged into one entity, and even later spun off from IAC altogether. They were "part of the same company" in that giant mega-corp super conglomerate owned both, but practically they were fully separate entities when Tinder was created. Match didn't buy Tinder, but it was merged with Tinder by parent company, just like OkCupid was acquired by IAC and merged with Match.

As a former employee, we did do NLP on messages but exclusively to find and suppress spammy/scammy/offensive messages. That system is dead now tho.

There was an actual effort at data science going on here before the marketing team took it over in the latter years. See the published book Dataclysm by one of the founders for more of the good stuff.