Computing with Comparative Linguistic Expressions and Symbolic Translation for Decision Making: ELICIT Information

Abstract

Many real-world decision making (DM) problems present changing contexts in which uncertainty or vagueness appear. Such uncertainty has been often modeled based on the linguistic information by using single linguistic terms. Dealing with linguistic information in DM demands processes of computing with words whose main characteristic is to emulate human beings reasoning processes to obtain linguistic outputs from linguistic inputs. However, often single linguistic terms are limited or do not express properly the expert’s knowledge, being necessary to elaborate richer linguistic expressions easy to understand and able to express greater amount of knowledge, as it is the case of the comparative linguistic expressions based on hesitant fuzzy linguistic terms sets. Nevertheless, current computational models for comparative linguistic expressions present limitations both from understandability and precision points of view. The 2-tuple linguistic representation model stands out in these aspects because of its accuracy and interpretability dealing with linguistic terms, both related to the use of the symbolic translation, although 2-tuple linguistic values are still limited by the use of single linguistic terms. Therefore, the aim of this article is to present a new fuzzy linguistic representation model for comparative linguistic expressions that takes advantage of the goodness of the 2-tuple linguistic representation model and improve the interpretability and accuracy of the results in computing with words processes, resulting the so-called extended comparative linguistic expressions with symbolic translation. Taking into account the proposed model, a new computing with words approach is presented and then applied to a DM case study to show its performance and advantages in a real case by comparing with other linguistic decision approaches.