Computing with Words in Information/Intelligent Systems 1: Foundations (Studies in Fuzziness and Soft Computing) (v. 1)

These two volumes consIstmg of Foundations and Applications provide the current status of theoretical and empirical developments in "computing with words". In philosophy, the twentieth century is said to be the century of language. This is mainly due to Wittgenstein who said: "The meaning of a word is its use in the language game". "The concept game is a concept with blurred edges". In the first phrase, "the language game" implies the everyday human activity with language, and in the latter, "game" simply implies an ordinary word. Thus, Wittgenstein precisely stated that a word is fuzzy in real life. Unfortunately this idea about a word was not accepted in the conventional science. We had to wait for Zadeh's fuzzy sets theory. Remembering Wittgenstein's statement, we should consider, on the one hand, the concept of "computing with words" from a philosophical point of view. It deeply relates to the everyday use of a word in which the meaning of a word is fuzzy in its nature.

The volume is the first one in the world literature which is a comprehensive, up to date account on computing with words, a new direction in broadly perceived intelligent systems, proposed and advocated by Professor Zadeh, the founder of fuzzy sets theory and fuzzy logic. Historically, computing was focused on manipulation of numbers. However, in recent years it became more and more obvious that computing had been encompassing not only this, but also manipulation on signal, sounds, images and text; the latter aspects of computing are becoming more and more relevant. However, the traditional manipulation of text (e.g., machine translation, spell checking, etc.) does not cover the mainstream of computing with words, mainly the representation and manipulation of propositions from natural language describing operations and relations. Such problems cannot be solved by conventional methods of logic, probability theory and numerical analysis. Fuzzy logic is shown to be an effective tool to handle such problems.
Computing with words may form a basis of a computational theory of perceptions inspired by a remarkable human ability to perform a wide variety of tasks just on the basis of vague and imprecise information expressed in natural language.
In Part 1 foundations of computing with words related to linguistic aspects, fuzzy logic and approximate reasoning, granularity, calculations on verbal quantities, and general architectures for the implementation of computing with words are presented.