Computing with Words: Towards a New Tuple-Based Formalization

An expert opinion describes his or her opinion about a quantity by using imprecise ("fuzzy") words from a natural language, such as "small", "medium", "large", etc. Each of these words provides a rather crude description of the corresponding quantity. A natural way to refine this description is to assign degrees to which the observed quantity fits each of the selected words. For example, an expert can say that the value is reasonable small, but to some extent it is medium. In this refined description, we represent each quantity by a tuple of the corresponding degrees. Once we have such a tuple-based information about several quantities x₁, x_m, and we know that another quantity y is related to x₁ by a known relation y = f (x₁,..., x_m), it is desirable to come up with a resulting tuple-based description of y. In this paper, we describe why a seemingly natural idea for computing such a tuple does not work, and we show how to modify this idea so that it can be used.