How much is “about”? Fuzzy interpretation of approximate numerical expressions

Abstract

Approximate Numerical Expressions (ANEs) are linguistic expressions involving numbers and referring to imprecise ranges of values, such as “about 100 ”. This paper proposes to interpret ANEs as fuzzy numbers. A model, taking into account the cognitive salience of numbers and based on critical points from Pareto frontiers, is proposed to characterise the support, the kernel and the 0.5-cut of the corresponding membership functions. An experimental study, based on real data, is performed to assess the quality of these estimated parameters.