Related papers: Reconstructing words using queries on subwords or …

We consider several novel aspects of unique factorization in formal languages. We reprove the familiar fact that the set uf(L) of words having unique factorization into elements of L is regular if L is regular, and from this deduce an…

Let S be a finite set of words over an alphabet Sigma. The set S is said to be complete if every word w over the alphabet Sigma is a factor of some element of S*, i.e. w belongs to Fact(S*). Otherwise if S is not complete, we are interested…

For a sequence $W$ we count the number $O_W(n)$ of minimal forbidden words no longer then $n$ and prove that $$\overline{\lim_{n \to \infty}} \frac{O_W(n)}{\log_3n} \geq 1.$$

Motivated by studies of data retrieval in polymer-based storage systems, we consider the problem of reconstructing a multiset of binary strings that have the same length and the same weight from the compositions of their prefixes and…

In this paper, we study arbitrary subword-closed languages over the alphabet $\{0,1\}$ (binary subword-closed languages). For the set of words $L(n)$ of the length $n$ belonging to a binary subword-closed language $L$, we investigate the…

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 subsequence of a word $w$ is a word $u$ such that $u = w[i_1] w[i_2] \cdots w[i_k]$, for some set of indices $1 \leq i_1 < i_2 < \dots < i_k \leq \vert w \vert$. A word $w$ is \emph{$k$-subsequence universal} over an alphabet $\Sigma$ if…

We extend the classical Ostrowski numeration systems, closely related to Sturmian words, by allowing a wider range of coefficients, so that possible representations of a number $n$ better reflect the structure of the associated Sturmian…

A \emph{power} is a word of the form $\underbrace{uu...u}_{k \; \text{times}}$, where $u$ is a word and $k$ is a positive integer; the power is also called a {\em $k$-power} and $k$ is its {\em exponent}. We prove that for any $k \ge 2$,…

We consider a variation on a classical avoidance problem from combinatorics on words that has been introduced by Mousavi and Shallit at DLT 2013. Let $\texttt{pexp}_i(w)$ be the supremum of the exponent over the products of $i$ factors of…

We introduce subsequence covers (s-covers, in short), a new type of covers of a word. A word $C$ is an s-cover of a word $S$ if the occurrences of $C$ in $S$ as subsequences cover all the positions in $S$. The s-covers seem to be…

Let $A_q$ be a $q$-letter alphabet and $w$ be a right infinite word on this alphabet. A subword of $w$ is a block of consecutive letters of $w$. The subword complexity function of $w$ assigns to each positive integer $n$ the number $f_w(n)$…

For a given language $L$, we study the languages $X$ such that for all distinct words $u, v \in L$, there exists a word $x \in X$ that appears a different number of times as a factor in $u$ and in $v$. In particular, we are interested in…

In this paper we examine decision problems associated with various classes of convex languages, studied by Ang and Brzozowski (under the name "continuous languages"). We show that we can decide whether a given language L is prefix-,…

In 2013, Fici and Zamboni proved a number of theorems about finite and infinite words having only a small number of factors that are palindromes. In this paper we rederive some of their results, and obtain some new ones, by a different…

Given a finite word u, we define its palindromic length |u|_{pal} to be the least number n such that u=v_1v_2... v_n with each v_i a palindrome. We address the following open question: Does there exist an infinite non ultimately periodic…

We study the set of finite words with zero palindromic defect, i.e., words rich in palindromes. This set is factorial, but not recurrent. We focus on description of pairs of rich words which cannot occur simultaneously as factors of a…

We engineer an algorithm to solve the approximate dictionary matching problem. Given a list of words $\mathcal{W}$, maximum distance $d$ fixed at preprocessing time and a query word $q$, we would like to retrieve all words from…

Let A be any set of positive integers and n a positive integer. A composition of n with parts in A is an ordered collection of one or more elements in A whose sum is n. We derive generating functions for the number of compositions of n with…

In this paper, we study a series of algorithmic problems related to the subsequences occurring in the strings of a given language, under the assumption that this language is succinctly represented by a grammar generating it, or an automaton…