Sometimes we need more than two classes. Perhaps we might want to do 3-way sentiment classification (positive, negative, or neutral). Or we could be assigning some of the labels we will introduce in Chapter 8, like the part of speech of a word (choosing from 10, 30, or even 50 different parts of speech), or the named entity type of a phrase (choosing from tags like person, location, organization). In such cases we use multinomial logistic regression, also called softmax regression (or, historically, the maxent classifier). In multinomial logistic regression the target y is a variable that ranges over more than two classes; we want to know the probability of y being in each potential class c ∈ C, p(y = c|x).