This paper separates conditional parameter estima- tion, which consistently raises test set accuracy on statistical NLP tasks, from conditional model struc- tures, such as the conditional Markov model used for maximum-entropy tagging, which tend to lower accuracy. Error analysis on part-of-speech tagging shows that the actual tagging errors made by the conditionally structured model derive not only from label bias, but also from other ways in which the independence assumptions of the conditional model structure are unsuited to linguistic sequences. The (...) paper presents new word-sense disambiguation and POS tagging experiments, and integrates apparently conflicting reports from other recent work. (shrink)