Given an alphabet of $k$ symbols, $\lbrace s_1,s_2, \ldots,s_k \rbrace$, how many words of length $n$, $w(n)$, can be generated knowing that,
- Only two of the $k$ available symbols participate;
- The symbol $s_i$ must appear exactly $n_i$ times and the symbol $s_j$ must appear exactly $n_j$ times and $n_i+n_j=n$ (the length of the word);
To ilustrate the problem suppose that the alphabet is $\lbrace A, B, C\rbrace$ and that I want words of length $4$ with two $A$ and two $B$. With the stated restrictions all of the possible words are
$\lbrace AABB, ABAB,ABBA, BBAA, BAAB, BABA \rbrace$
So, I need to know what this $w(n)=w(n_i,n_j)$ is. Some references on aproaches on how to solve this kind of problems and related algorithms to generate such words would be apreciated.
Thanks.