“…There are also been several attempts to apply the derivation techniques to expressions over non free monoids, namely direct products of free monoids, for dealing with rational relations. In [8], the extension is made through a new operator that represents the direct product of two languages (or relations), while in [12] the atoms of the expression, that are letters in the classical case, are replaced by pairs of letters or special symbols (expressing constraints over letters or pairs). The formalism used in both papers bears some similarities with ours, but they both use it to define an analogue of the derivation to bring the construction of the transducer back to the usual construction of the derived-term automaton.…”