ON PARIKH MATRICES, AMBIGUITY, AND PRINTS
Virgil Nicolae Şerbănuţă · International Journal of Foundations of Computer Science · 2009
In the algebraic study of words and languages it is often convenient to analyze words as numerical quantities. One such now-famous example is the study of words by using their attached Parikh mapping (or vector). However, the Parikh vector abstracts away too much of the structure of the word. Parikh matrices were introduced as a means to obtain more than just the number of occurrences of single letters. When studying properties of words, an important property is that a word is uniquely determined by the number of occurrences of certain predetermined subwords. In the context of Parikh matrices, the problem is translated in finding which words are completely characterized by their associated Parikh matrix. This paper links this problem with that of the print of a word, i.e. the word obtained by considering consecutive occurrences of the same letter as only one letter. We obtain results regarding finiteness and context-freeness of such classes of words.