Bottom Up Quotients and Residuals for Tree Languages

Abstract: In this paper, we extend the notion of tree language quotients to bottom-up quotients. Instead of computing the residual of a tree language from top to bottom and producing a list of tree languages, we show how to compute a set of k-ary trees, where k is an arbitrary integer. We define the quotient formula for different combinations of tree languages: union, symbol products, compositions, iterated symbol products and iterated composition. These computations lead to the definition of the bottom-up quotient tree automaton, that turns out to be the minimal deterministic tree automaton associated with a regular tree language in the case of the 0-ary trees.