Related papers: The overlap gap between left-infinite and right-in…
A pattern $\alpha$ is a string of variables and terminal letters. We say that $\alpha$ matches a word $w$, consisting only of terminal letters, if $w$ can be obtained by replacing the variables of $\alpha$ by terminal words. The matching…
The \emph{state complexity} of a regular language $L_m$ is the number $m$ of states in a minimal deterministic finite automaton (DFA) accepting $L_m$. The state complexity of a regularity-preserving binary operation on regular languages is…
Deciding periodicity of infinite words generated by morphisms is a classical result in combinatorics on words from 80's by Harju, Linna and Pansiot. In this paper, we are interested in this question in the abelian setting. Two words are…
A narrow connection between infinite binary words rich in classical palindromes and infinite binary words rich simultaneously in palindromes and pseudopalindromes (the so-called $H$-rich words) is demonstrated. The correspondence between…
The deviation of the observed frequency of a word $w$ from its expected frequency in a given sequence $x$ is used to determine whether or not the word is avoided. This concept is particularly useful in DNA linguistic analysis. The value of…
We study cube-free words over arbitrary non-unary finite alphabets and prove the following structural property: for every pair $(u,v)$ of $d$-ary cube-free words, if $u$ can be infinitely extended to the right and $v$ can be infinitely…
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…
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…
A factor $u$ of a word $w$ is a cover of $w$ if every position in $w$ lies within some occurrence of $u$ in $w$. A word $w$ covered by $u$ thus generalizes the idea of a repetition, that is, a word composed of exact concatenations of $u$.…
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 \emph{covering array} is an $N \times k$ array of elements from a $v$-ary alphabet such that every $N \times t$ subarray contains all $v^t$ tuples from the alphabet of size $t$ at least $\lambda$ times; this is denoted as $\CA_\lambda(N;…
The hierarchical overlap graph (HOG) is a graph that encodes overlaps from a given set P of n strings, as the overlap graph does. A best known algorithm constructs HOG in O(||P|| log n) time and O(||P||) space, where ||P|| is the sum of…
We study words that barely avoid repetitions, for several senses of "barely". A squarefree (respectively, overlap-free, cubefree) word is irreducible if removing any one of its interior letters creates a square (respectively, overlap,…
A finite word $w$ is called \emph{rich} if it contains $\vert w\vert+1$ distinct palindromic factors including the empty word. For every finite rich word $w$ there are distinct nonempty palindromes $w_1, w_2,\dots,w_p$ such that…
The palindromic length of the finite word $v$ is equal to the minimal number of palindromes whose concatenation is equal to $v$. It was conjectured in 2013 that for every infinite aperiodic word $x$, the palindromic length of its factors is…
Frid, Puzynina and Zamboni (2013) defined the palindromic length of a finite word $w$ as the minimal number of palindromes whose concatenation is equal to $w$. For an infinite word $u$ we study $PL_{u}$, that is, the function that assigns…
For finite reflection groups of types A and B, we determine the diameter of the graph whose vertices are reduced words for the longest element and whose edges are braid relations. This is deduced from a more general theorem that applies to…
The equivalence problem for unambiguous grammars is an important, but very difficult open question in formal language theory. Consider the \emph{limited} equivalence problem for unambiguous grammars -- for two unambiguous grammars $G_1$ and…
A pair $(A,B)$ of hypergraphs is called orthogonal if $|a \cap b|=1$ for every pair of edges $a \in A$ and $b \in B$. An orthogonal pair of hypergraphs is called a loom if each of its two members is the set of minimum covers of the other.…
For a word $\pi$ and integer $i$, we define $L^i(\pi)$ to be the length of the longest subsequence of the form $i(i+1)\cdots j$, and we let $L(\pi):=\max_i L^i(\pi)$. In this paper we estimate the expected values of $L^1(\pi)$ and $L(\pi)$…