Related papers: A regularity lemma and twins in words
The pioneering research of G. K. Zipf on the relationship between word frequency and other word features led to the formulation of various linguistic laws. The most popular is Zipf's law for word frequencies. Here we focus on two laws that…
Let $A$ and $B$ be sets of words of length $n$ over some finite alphabet. Suppose that no suffix of a word in $A$ coincides with a prefix of a word in $B$. Then we show that the product of densities of $A$ and $B$ is upper bounded by…
We extend results regarding a combinatorial model introduced by Black, Drellich, and Tymoczko (2017+) which generalizes the folding of the RNA molecule in biology. Consider a word on alphabet $\{A_1, \overline{A}_1, \ldots, A_m,…
The task of the binary classification problem is to determine which of two distributions has generated a length-$n$ test sequence. The two distributions are unknown; two training sequences of length $N$, one from each distribution, are…
A universal cycle, or u-cycle, for a given set of words is a circular word that contains each word from the set exactly once as a contiguous subword. The celebrated de Bruijn sequences are a particular case of such a u-cycle, where a set in…
This paper gives a short overview of Zimin words, and proves an interesting property of their distribution. Let $L_q^m$ to be the lexically ordered sequence of $q$-ary words of length $m$, and let $T_n(L_q^m)$ to be the binary sequence…
Let $f(n)$ be the smallest number such that every collection of $n$ matchings, each of size at least $f(n)$, in a bipartite graph, has a full rainbow matching. Generalizing famous conjectures of Ryser, Brualdi and Stein, Aharoni and Berger…
In 2011, Fici and Lipt\'ak introduced prefix normal words. A binary word is prefix normal if it has no factor (substring) that contains more occurrences of the letter 1 than the prefix of the same length. Among the open problems regarding…
Following (Kolpakov et al., 2013; Gawrychowski and Manea, 2015), we continue the study of {\em $\alpha$-gapped repeats} in strings, defined as factors $uvu$ with $|uv|\leq \alpha |u|$. Our main result is the $O(\alpha n)$ bound on the…
We consider the length of the longest word definable in FO and MSO via a formula of size n. For both logics we obtain as an upper bound for this number an exponential tower of height linear in n. We prove this by counting types with respect…
The size of the largest common subtree (maximum agreement subtree) of two independent uniform random binary trees on $n$ leaves is known to be between orders $n^{1/8}$ and $n^{1/2}$. By a construction based on recursive splitting and…
A double occurrence word (DOW) is a word in which every symbol appears exactly twice; two DOWs are equivalent if one is a symbol-to-symbol image of the other. We consider the so called repeat pattern ($\alpha\alpha$) and the return pattern…
The exponent of a word is the ratio of its length over its smallest period. The repetitive threshold r(a) of an a-letter alphabet is the smallest rational number for which there exists an infinite word whose finite factors have exponent at…
Given a partially-ordered finite alphabet $\Sigma$ and a language $L\subseteq \Sigma^*$, how large can an antichain in $L$ be (where $L$ is given the lexicographic ordering)? More precisely, since $L$ will in general be infinite, we should…
Zipf's law of abbreviation, the tendency of more frequent words to be shorter, is one of the most solid candidates for a linguistic universal, in the sense that it has the potential for being exceptionless or with a number of exceptions…
A binary word is a map W : N --> {0,1}, and the set of factors of W with length n is F_n(W):={(W(i),W(i+1),...,W(i+n-1)) : i >= 0}. A word is Sturmian if |F_n(W)|=n+1 for every n>0. We show that the sum of the heights (also known as hamming…
The net frequency (NF) of a string, of length $m$, in a text, of length $n$, is the number of occurrences of the string in the text with unique left and right extensions. Recently, Guo et al. [CPM 2024] showed that NF is combinatorially…
Let $\mathfrak A$ be an alphabet and $W$ be a set of words in the free monoid ${\mathfrak A}^*$. Let $S(W)$ denote the Rees quotient over the ideal of ${\mathfrak A}^*$ consisting of all words that are not subwords of words in $W$. A set of…
A {\em subsequence} of a word $w$ is a word $u$ that can be obtained by deleting some letters from $w$ while maintaining the relative order of the remaining letters, e.g., $\mathtt{lala}$ is a subsequence of $\mathtt{alfalfa}$. A word, over…
A run in a word is a periodic factor whose length is at least twice its period and which cannot be extended to the left or right (by a letter) to a factor with greater period. In recent years a great deal of work has been done on estimating…