DMCA
The Concept of a Linguistic Variable and its Application to Approximate Reasoning (1975)
| Venue: | Journal of Information Science |
| Citations: | 1423 - 9 self |
BibTeX
@ARTICLE{Zadeh75theconcept,
author = {L. A. Zadeh},
title = {The Concept of a Linguistic Variable and its Application to Approximate Reasoning},
journal = {Journal of Information Science},
year = {1975},
pages = {199}
}
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Abstract
By a linguistic variable we mean a variable whose values are words or sentences in a natural or artificial language. I:or example, Age is a linguistic variable if its values are linguistic rather than numerical, i.e., young, not young, very young, quite young, old, not very oldand not very young, etc., rather than 20, 21, 22, 23, In more specific terms, a linguistic variable is characterized by a quintuple (&?, T(z), U, G,M) in which &? is the name of the variable; T(s) is the term-set of2, that is, the collection of its linguistic values; U is a universe of discourse; G is a syntactic rule which generates the terms in T(z); and M is a semantic rule which associates with each linguistic value X its meaning, M(X), where M(X) denotes a fuzzy subset of U The meaning of a linguistic value X is characterized by a compatibility function, c: l / + [0, I], which associates with each u in U its compatibility with X. Thus, the COItIpdtibiiity of age 27 with young might be 0.7, while that of 35 might be 0.2. The function of the semantic rule is to relate the compdtibihties of the so-called primary terms in a composite linguistic value-e.g.,.young and old in not very young and not very old-to the compatibility of the composite value. To this end, the hedges
