Information systems are using an increasing amount of unstructured information in the form of text. This situation has spawned a need to improve the text-mining technologies needed for information retrieval, filtering, and classification. This article compares some of the options available and how they can provide textual data-mining functionalities to software applications. In particular, the authors focus on Pimiento, a new object-oriented application framework for text mining. This framework allows developers to easily create distributed applications that use machine learning and statistical techniques to automatically process documents.