Introduction to the Fusion of Quantitative and Qualitative Beliefs

The efficient management and combination of uncertain and conflict- ing sources of information remain of primal importance for the development of re- liable information fusion systems. Advanced fusion systems must deal both with quantitative and qualitative aspects of beliefs expressed by the differen t sources of information (sensors, expert systems, human reports, etc). This paper intro- duces the theory of plausible and paradoxical reasoning, known as DSmT (Dezert- Smarandache Theory) in literature, developed originally for dealing with impre- cise, uncertain and potentially highly conflicting sources of information pro viding quantitative beliefs on a given set of possible solutions of a given proble m. We also propose in this paper new ideas on a possible extension of DSmT for the combination of uncertain and conflicting qualitative information in order to de al directly with beliefs expressed with linguistic labels instead of numerical value s to be closer to the nature of information expressed in natural languages and available directly from human experts.