Linguistic Variables : a Powerful Concept for Knowledge Representation

The power of daily communication and commonsense reasoning lies in the use of natural language. The importance of computing with words has increased tremendously over the last decades and will continue to do so during the ones to come. A key-role in this process is played by linguistic variables, i.e. variables whose values are linguistic terms. Since these terms are often vague, they cannot be modelled by classical set theory in se. In this paper we point out the importance of linguistic terms for the representation and the manipulation of knowledge. We describe how atomic terms, logically composed terms and modified terms can be represented using the framework of fuzzy set theory.