Aggregating Imprecise Linguistic Expressions

Abstract

In this chapter, we propose a multi-person decision making procedure where agents judge the alternatives through linguistic expressions generated by an ordered finite scale of linguistic terms (for instance, ‘very good’, ‘good’, ‘acceptable’, ‘bad’, ‘very bad’). If the agents are not confident about their opinions, they might use linguistic expressions composed by several consecutive linguistic terms (for instance, ‘between acceptable and good’). The procedure we propose is based on distances and it ranks order the alternatives taking into account the linguistic information provided by the agents. The main features and properties of the proposal are analyzed.