In this section we introduce our first sequence labeling algorithm, the Hidden Markov Model, and show how to apply it to part-of-speech tagging. Recall that a sequence labeler is a model whose job is to assign a label to each unit in a sequence, thus mapping a sequence of observations to a sequence of labels of the same length. The HMM is a classic model that introduces many of the key concepts of sequence modeling that we will see again in more modern models.