However, the CRF does not compute a probability for each tag at each time step. Instead, at each time step the CRF computes log-linear functions over a set of relevant features, and these local features are aggregated and normalized to produce a global probability for the whole sequence. Let's introduce the CRF more formally, again using X and Y as the input and output sequences. A CRF is a log-linear model that assigns a probability to an entire output (tag) sequence Y , out of all possible sequences Y, given the entire input (word) sequence X. We can think of a CRF as like a giant version of what multinomial logistic regression does for a single token. Recall that the feature function f in regular multinomial logistic regression can be viewed as a function of a tuple: a token x and a label y (page 92). In a CRF, the function F maps an entire input sequence X and an entire output sequence Y to a feature vector. Let's assume we have K features, with a weight w k for each feature F k :