Would you like to describe Conditional Random Fields for me?

I'm an undegraduate in language technology, and am right now writing a paper on Chinese word segmentation where the program I'm evaluating is using Conditional Random Fields for statistical modeling which I'm expected to describe. I've got a fairly basic understanding of the Hidden Markov Model, but I have a problem grasping the difference between these two algorithms.

If someone would like to enlighten me on the subject, you shall have both my upvotes and gratitude!