Maximal Repetition and Zero Entropy Rate

Maximal repetition of a string is the maximal length of a repeated substring. This paper investigates maximal repetition of strings drawn from stochastic processes. Strengthening previous results, two new bounds for the almost sure growth rate of maximal repetition are identified: an upper bound in terms of conditional Rényi entropy of order <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\gamma >1$ </tex-math></inline-formula> given a sufficiently long past and a lower bound in terms of unconditional Shannon entropy (<inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\gamma =1$ </tex-math></inline-formula>). Both the upper and the lower bound can be proved using an inequality for the distribution of recurrence time. We also supply an alternative proof of the lower bound which makes use of an inequality for the expectation of subword complexity. In particular, it is shown that a power-law logarithmic growth of maximal repetition with respect to the string length, recently observed for texts in natural language, may hold only if the conditional Rényi entropy rate given a sufficiently long past equals zero. According to this observation, natural language cannot be faithfully modeled by a typical hidden Markov process, which is a class of basic language models used in computational linguistics.