However the two point-wise Gibbs samplers investigated here, which resample the label of each word conditioned on the labels of its neighbours (amongst other things) only require O(m) steps per sample (where m is the number of HMM states), while EM, VB and the sentence-blocked Gibbs samplers require O(m 2 ) steps per sample.
for HMMs with many states it is possible to perform one or two orders of magnitude more iterations of the point-wise Gibbs samplers in the same run-time as the other samplers, so it is plausible that they would yield better results.