From i-boxes to signed words

Abstract: The combinatorics of i-boxes has recently been introduced by Kashiwara--Kim--Oh--Park in the study of cluster algebras arising from the representation theory of quantum affine algebras. In this article, we associate to each chain of i-boxes a signed word, which canonically determines a cluster seed following Berenstein--Fomin--Zelevinsky. By bridging these two different languages, we are able to provide a quick solution to the problem of explicit determining the exchange matrices associated with chains of i-boxes.