On universal partial words for word-patterns and set partitions

Abstract

Universal words are words containing exactly once each element from a given set of combinatorial structures admitting encoding by words. Universal partial words (u-p-words) contain, in addition to the letters from the alphabet in question, any number of occurrences of a special “joker” symbol. We initiate the study of u-p-words for word-patterns (essentially, surjective functions) and (2-)set partitions by proving a number of existence/non-existence results and thus extending the results in the literature on u-p-words and u-p-cycles for words and permutations. We apply methods of graph theory and combinatorics on words to obtain our results.