A tool for aggregation with words

The need of computing with words has become an important topic in many areas dealing with vague information. The aim of this paper is to present different tools which support computing with words. Especially, we are concerned with the weighted aggregation of linguistic term sets, whose results are just the words themselves without using the fuzzy numbers that represent the semantics of their linguistic terms. We propose a new aggregation operator, referred to as the symbolic weighted median that Computes the most representative element from an ordered collection of weighted linguistic terms. This operator aggregates the linguistic labels such that its result is expressed in terms of the initial linguistic term set though is modified by using dedicated tools called the generalized symbolic modifiers. One advantage of this proposal is that the expression domain does not change: we increase or decrease the granularity only where it becomes necessary. Additionally this new operator exhibits several interesting mathematical properties. (C) 2009 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.