Information extraction helps in building advanced tools for text processing applications such as electronic publishing and information retrieval. The applications differ in their requirements on the input text, output information, and available resources for information extraction. Since existing IE technologies are application specific, extensive expert work is required to meet the needs of each new application. However, today, most users do not have this expertise and thus need a tool to easily create IE systems tailored to their needs. We introduce a framework that consists of (1) an extensible set of advanced IE technologies together with a description of the properties of their input, output, and resources, and (2) a generator that selects the relevant technologies for a specific application and integrates these into an IE system. A prototype of the framework is presented, and the generation of IE systems for two example applications is illustrated. The results are presented as guidelines for further development of the framework.