CRFSharp

CRFSharp(aka CRF#) is a .NET(C#) implementation of Conditional Random Fields, an machine learning algorithm for learning from labeled sequences of examples. It is widely used in Natural Language Process (NLP) tasks, for example: word breaker, postagging, named entity recognized, query chunking and so on.

CRF#'s mainly algorithm is the same as CRF++ written by Taku Kudo. It encodes model parameters by L-BFGS. Moreover, it has many significant improvement than CRF++, such as totally parallel encoding, optimizing memory usage and so on.

Currently, when training corpus, compared with CRF++, CRF# can make full use of multi-core CPUs and only uses very low memory, and memory grow is very smoothly and slowly while amount of training corpus, tags increase. with multi-threads process, CRF# is more suitable for large data and tags training than CRF++ now. For example, in machine with 64GB, CRF# encodes model with more than 4.5 hundred million features quickly.