Python has NLTK , Java has Stanford's NLP tools , probably PHP also has a bunch of em, is there any such collection of tools for C++?

I have found some but either they were not open source (freeware/shareware) or discontinued.

If there are none , could anyone direct me to the resources which can explain how named entity recognition works? I think I can try to implement one if there is none (my training/testing set is limited).

I would highly likely would find a POS tagger , but it would be helpful if I can know how this thing works.

And lastly I would request Keshav Dhandhania , if he can share some his projects on Machine Learning especially Natural Language Processing with us.