A classifier is a machine learning tool that will take data items and place them into one of k classes. A probabilistic classifier, like this one, can also give a probability distribution over the class assignment for a data item. This software is a Java implementation of a maximum entropy classifier. Maximum entropy models are otherwise known as softmax classifiers and are essentially equivalent to multiclass logistic regression models (though parameterized slightly differently, in a way that is advantageous with sparse explanatory feature vectors). In other words, this is the same basic technology that you're usually getting in various of the cloud-based machine learning APIs (Amazon, Google, ...) The classification method is described in: