On Word-Representable and Multi-word-Representable Graphs

Abstract

The notion of word-representable graphs has been extensively studied. It is well known that the set of word-representable graphs are exactly the graphs whose edges can be ordered in a semi-transitive manner. Thus the set of word-representable graphs is decidable. This paper gives an alternative and simpler proof of decidability of word-representable graphs. The second part of the paper introduces a notion called multi-word-representability. Many classes of graphs - planar graphs, interval graphs, split graphs, co-bipartite graphs and line graphs - are shown to be two word-representable. An upper bound on the number of words needed to represent $$k-$$ colourable graphs has also been calculated.