An approach towards linguistic instructions understanding using the concept of flexible linguistic variables

Abstract

Humans often face situations where they have to perform a very crisp and precise action based on a given linguistic instruction which is essentially imprecise. One might view a linguistic instruction as a set of almost infinite crisp solutions where the receiver finally selects one of those solutions to execute the command. Recently, fuzzy set theory has been proposed to realize a better human-machine interaction. Yet, it is very difficult to embed the perhaps most important ability of human in natural language understanding, namely to interpret a linguistic instruction situation dependent. Based on the recently proposed concept of a flexible linguistic variable by the author (1994), an approach towards situation dependent understanding of linguistic instructions is proposed and demonstrated by a simple simulation experiment.<>