To perform analysis, decision-making, and knowledge management tasks, information systems use an increasing amount of unstructured information in the form of text. This data influx, in turn, has spawned a need to improve the text-mining technologies required for information retrieval, filtering, and classification. This article compares some of the options available. In particular, the authors focus on Pimiento, a new object-oriented application framework that lets developers create distributed applications that use machine-learning and statistical techniques to automatically process documents