Two-sided shift spaces over infinite alphabets

Ott, Tomforde, and Willis proposed a useful compactification for one-sided shifts over infinite alphabets. Building from their idea we develop a notion of two-sided shift spaces over infinite alphabets, with an eye towards generalizing a result of Kitchens. As with the one-sided shifts over infinite alphabets our shift spaces are compact Hausdorff spaces but, in contrast to the one-sided setting, our shift map is continuous everywhere. We show that many of the classical results from symbolic dynamics are still true for our two-sided shift spaces. In particular, while for one-sided shifts the problem about whether or not any $M$-step shift is conjugate to an edge shift space is open, for two-sided shifts we can give a positive answer for this question.Comment: 32 page

Sofic-Dyck shifts

We define the class of sofic-Dyck shifts which extends the class of Markov-Dyck shifts introduced by Inoue, Krieger and Matsumoto. Sofic-Dyck shifts are shifts of sequences whose finite factors form unambiguous context-free languages. We show that they correspond exactly to the class of shifts of sequences whose sets of factors are visibly pushdown languages. We give an expression of the zeta function of a sofic-Dyck shift

On Hilberg's Law and Its Links with Guiraud's Law

Hilberg (1990) supposed that finite-order excess entropy of a random human text is proportional to the square root of the text length. Assuming that Hilberg's hypothesis is true, we derive Guiraud's law, which states that the number of word types in a text is greater than proportional to the square root of the text length. Our derivation is based on some mathematical conjecture in coding theory and on several experiments suggesting that words can be defined approximately as the nonterminals of the shortest context-free grammar for the text. Such operational definition of words can be applied even to texts deprived of spaces, which do not allow for Mandelbrot's ``intermittent silence'' explanation of Zipf's and Guiraud's laws. In contrast to Mandelbrot's, our model assumes some probabilistic long-memory effects in human narration and might be capable of explaining Menzerath's law.Comment: To appear in Journal of Quantitative Linguistic

Decompositions of factor codes and embeddings between shift spaces with unequal entropies

Given a factor code between sofic shifts X and Y, there is a family of decompositions of the original code into factor codes such that the entropies of the intermediate subshifts arising from the decompositions are dense in the interval from the entropy of Y to that of X. Furthermore, if X is of finite type, we can choose those intermediate subshifts as shifts of finite type. In the second part of the paper, given an embedding from a shift space to an irreducible sofic shift, we characterize the set of the entropies of the intermediate subshifts arising from the decompositions of the given embedding into embeddings.Comment: 14pages, 2 figures; v2) minor revision. to appear in Ergodic Theory Dynamical System