“…Note that this approach, denoted "acceleration by text-compression", has been recently applied to some classical problems on strings. Various compression schemes, such as LZ77, LZW-LZ78, Huffman coding, Byte Pair Encoding (BPE) and Run Length Encoding (RLE), were employed to accelerate exact string matching [19,24,31,22], subsequence matching [10], approximate pattern matching [1,18,20,28] and sequence alignment [3,4,9,15,23]. In light of the practical importance of HMM-based classification methods in state-of-the-art research, and in view of the fact that such techniques are also based on dynamic programming, we set out to answer the following question: can "acceleration by text compression" be applied to HMM decoding and training algorithms?…”