A Gentle Introduction and Survey on Computing with Words (CWW) Methodologies

TL;DR

This paper provides a comprehensive, accessible survey of Computing with Words (CWW) methodologies, explaining their foundations, current state, and future research directions to assist newcomers and researchers in the field.

Contribution

It offers the first unified, simple overview of CWW methodologies, consolidating scattered literature and guiding new researchers in understanding and applying CWW techniques.

Findings

Provides a wide-ranging, easy-to-understand survey of CWW methodologies.

Identifies gaps and future directions in CWW research.

Facilitates entry for new researchers into the field of CWW.

Abstract

Human beings have an inherent capability to use linguistic information (LI) seamlessly even though it is vague and imprecise. Computing with Words (CWW) was proposed to impart computing systems with this capability of human beings. The interest in the field of CWW is evident from a number of publications on various CWW methodologies. These methodologies use different ways to model the semantics of the LI. However, to the best of our knowledge, the literature on these methodologies is mostly scattered and does not give an interested researcher a comprehensive but gentle guide about the notion and utility of these methodologies. Hence, to introduce the foundations and state-of-the-art CWW methodologies, we provide a concise but a wide-ranging coverage of them in a simple and easy to understand manner. We feel that the simplicity with which we give a high-quality review and introduction to the CWW methodologies is very useful for investigators, especially those embarking on the use of CWW for the first time. We also provide future research directions to build upon for the interested and motivated researchers.