- Conditional random fields (CRFs) are probabilistic graphical models that can be used for labeling and segmenting sequential data. They generalize hidden Markov models (HMMs) by allowing dependencies between labels. - CRFs are discriminative models that directly model the conditional probability of labels given observations, rather than the joint probability like generative models. This allows them to avoid problems with independence assumptions. - Linear-chain CRFs are commonly used for sequential labeling tasks. They incorporate a large number of features without conditional independence assumptions, outperforming HMMs on problems like gene prediction. Parameter estimation is done with maximum likelihood.