Perceptual Computing / IEEE Press Series on Computational Intelligence (PDF)

Explains for the first time how "computing with words" can aid
in making subjective judgments

Lotfi Zadeh, the father of fuzzy logic, coined the phrase
"computing with words" (CWW) to describe a methodology in which the
objects of computation are words and propositions drawn from a
natural language. Perceptual Computing explains how to implement
CWW to aid in the important area of making subjective judgments,
using a methodology that leads to an interactive device--a
"Perceptual Computer"--that propagates random and linguistic
uncertainties into the subjective judgment in a way that can be
modeled and observed by the judgment maker.

This book focuses on the three components of a Perceptual
Computer--encoder, CWW engines, and decoder--and then
provides detailed applications for each. It uses interval type-2
fuzzy sets (IT2 FSs) and fuzzy logic as the mathematical vehicle
for perceptual computing, because such fuzzy sets can model
first-order linguistic uncertainties whereas the usual kind of
fuzzy sets cannot. Drawing upon the work on subjective judgments
that Jerry Mendel and his students completed over the past decade,
Perceptual Computing shows readers how to:

* Map word-data with its inherent uncertainties into an IT2 FS
that captures these uncertainties

* Use uncertainty measures to quantify linguistic
uncertainties

* Compare IT2 FSs by using similarity and rank

* Compute the subsethood of one IT2 FS in another such set

* Aggregate disparate data, ranging from numbers to uniformly
weighted intervals to nonuniformly weighted intervals to words

* Aggregate multiple-fired IF-THEN rules so that the integrity of
word IT2 FS models is preserved

Free MATLAB-based software is also available online so readers
can apply the methodology of perceptual computing immediately, and
even try to improve upon it. Perceptual Computing is an
important go-to for researchers and students in the fields of
artificial intelligence and fuzzy logic, as well as for operations
researchers, decision makers, psychologists, computer scientists,
and computational intelligence experts.