English

$\alpha$-$\beta$-Factorization and the Binary Case of Simon's Congruence

Combinatorics 2023-09-12 v3 Computation and Language

Abstract

In 1991 H\'ebrard introduced a factorization of words that turned out to be a powerful tool for the investigation of a word's scattered factors (also known as (scattered) subwords or subsequences). Based on this, first Karandikar and Schnoebelen introduced the notion of kk-richness and later on Barker et al. the notion of kk-universality. In 2022 Fleischmann et al. presented a generalization of the arch factorization by intersecting the arch factorization of a word and its reverse. While the authors merely used this factorization for the investigation of shortest absent scattered factors, in this work we investigate this new α\alpha-β\beta-factorization as such. We characterize the famous Simon congruence of kk-universal words in terms of 11-universal words. Moreover, we apply these results to binary words. In this special case, we obtain a full characterization of the classes and calculate the index of the congruence. Lastly, we start investigating the ternary case, present a full list of possibilities for αβα\alpha\beta\alpha-factors, and characterize their congruence.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2306.14192,
  title  = {$\alpha$-$\beta$-Factorization and the Binary Case of Simon's Congruence},
  author = {Pamela Fleischmann and Jonas Höfer and Annika Huch and Dirk Nowotka},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2306.14192},
  year   = {2023}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-28T11:13:46.909Z