An Insight Into The Z-number Approach To CWW

The Z-number is a new fuzzy-theoretic concept, proposed by Zadeh in 2011. It extends the basic philosophy of Computing With Words (CWW) to include the perception of uncertainty of the information conveyed by a natural language statement. The Z-number thus, serves as a model of linguistic summarization of natural language statements, a technique to merge human-affective perspectives with CWW, and consequently can be envisaged to play a radical role in the domain of CWW-based system design and Natural Language Processing (NLP). This article presents a comprehensive investigation of the Z-number approach to CWW. We present here: a) an outline of our understanding of the generic architecture, algorithm and challenges underlying CWW in general; b) a detailed study of the Z-number methodology - where we propose an algorithm for CWW using Z-numbers, define a Z-number based operator for the evaluation of the level of requirement satisfaction, and describe simulation experiments of CWW utilizing Z-numbers; and c) analyse the strengths and the challenges of the Z-numbers, and suggest possible solution strategies. We believe that this article would inspire research on the need for inclusion of human-behavioural aspects into CWW, as well as the integration of CWW and NLP.