Related papers: Efficiently Finding All Maximal $\alpha$-gapped Re…
A pattern is encountered in a word if some infix of the word is the image of the pattern under some non-erasing morphism. A pattern $p$ is unavoidable if, over every finite alphabet, every sufficiently long word encounters $p$. A theorem by…
We characterize the formulas that are avoided by every $\alpha$-free word for some $\alpha>1$. We study the avoidability index of formulas whose fragments are of the form $XYX$. The largest avoidability index of an avoidable palindrome…
If $x$ is a non-empty string then the repetition $xx$ is called a tandem repeat. Similarly, a tandem in a two dimensional array $X$ is a configuration consisting of a same primitive block $W$ that touch each other with one side or corner.…
Overlaps between words are crucial in many areas of computer science, such as code design, stringology, and bioinformatics. A self overlapping word is characterized by its periods and borders. A period of a word $u$ is the starting position…
A \emph{border} of a word $w$ is a word that is both a non-empty proper prefix and suffix of $w$. If $w$ has a border, then it is said to be \emph{bordered}; otherwise, it is said to be \emph{unbordered}. The main results of this paper are…
A palindromic periodicity is a factor of an infinite word $(ps)^\omega$ where $p$ and $s$ are palindromes and the factor has length at least $|ps|$, for example, $accabaccab$. In this paper we describe several ways in which a palindromic…
A square is the concatenation of a nonempty word with itself. A word has period p if its letters at distance p match. The exponent of a nonempty word is the quotient of its length over its smallest period. In this article we give a proof of…
We consider string matching with variable length gaps. Given a string $T$ and a pattern $P$ consisting of strings separated by variable length gaps (arbitrary strings of length in a specified range), the problem is to find all ending…
Let $u \shuffle v$ denote the set of all shuffles of the words $u$ and $v$. It is shown that for each integer $n \geq 3$ there exists a square-free ternary word $u$ of length $n$ such that $u\shuffle u$ contains a square-free word. This…
A correlation is a binary vector that encodes all possible positions of overlaps of two words, where an overlap for an ordered pair of words (u,v) occurs if a suffix of word u matches a prefix of word v. As multiple pairs can have the same…
We say that a family $\mathcal{W}$ of strings over $\Sigma^+$ forms a Unique Maximal Factorization Family (UMFF) if and only if every $w \in \mathcal{W}$ has a unique maximal factorization. Further, an UMFF $\mathcal{W}$ is called a…
The avoidability, or unavoidability of patterns in words over finite alphabets has been studied extensively. A word (pattern) over a finite set is said to be unavoidable if, for all but finitely many words, there exists a morphism mapping…
A word $u$ defined over an alphabet $\mathcal{A}$ is $c$-balanced ($c\in\mathbb{N}$) if for all pairs of factors $v$, $w$ of $u$ of the same length and for all letters $a\in\mathcal{A}$, the difference between the number of letters $a$ in…
An abelian square is the concatenation of two words that are anagrams of one another. A word of length $n$ can contain at most $\Theta(n^2)$ distinct factors, and there exist words of length $n$ containing $\Theta(n^2)$ distinct…
We study a new generalization of palindromes and gapped palindromes called block palindromes. A block palindrome is a string that becomes a palindrome when identical substrings are replaced with a distinct character. We investigate several…
An abelian square is the concatenation of two words that are anagrams of one another. A word of length $n$ can contain $\Theta(n^2)$ distinct factors that are abelian squares. We study infinite words such that the number of abelian square…
A subsequence of a word $w$ is a word $u$ such that $u = w[i_1] w[i_2] , \dots w[i_{|u|}]$, for some set of indices $1 \leq i_1 < i_2 < \dots < i_k \leq |w|$. A word $w$ is $k$-subsequence universal over an alphabet $\Sigma$ if every word…
Hairpin completion is an abstract operation modeling a DNA bio-operation which receives as input a DNA strand $w = x\alpha y \calpha$, and outputs $w' = x \alpha y \bar{\alpha} \bar{x}$, where $\bar{x}$ denotes the Watson-Crick complement…
Trapezoidal words are finite words having at most n+1 distinct factors of length n, for every n>=0. They encompass finite Sturmian words. We distinguish trapezoidal words into two disjoint subsets: open and closed trapezoidal words. A…
A subsequence of a word $w$ is a word $u$ such that $u = w[i_1] w[i_2] \dots w[i_{k}]$, for some set of indices $1 \leq i_1 < i_2 < \dots < i_k \leq \lvert w\rvert$. A word $w$ is $k$-subsequence universal over an alphabet $\Sigma$ if every…