The Viterbi algorithm is the conventional decoding algorithm most widely adopted for sequence labeling. Viterbi decoding is, however, prohibitively slow when the label set is large, because its time complexity is quadratic in the number of labels. This paper proposes an exact decoding algorithm that overcomes this problem. A novel property of our algorithm is that it efficiently reduces the labels to be decoded, while still allowing us to check the optimality of the solution.
