Impact of the shape of membership functions on the truth values of linguistic protoform summaries

Abstract

In the recent past, a lot of work has been done on Linguistic Protoform Summaries (LPS). Much of this work focuses on improvement of the ways to compute truth values of LPS as well as on development of different protoforms. However, almost all of the systems using LPS use trapezoidal membership functions. This work investigates the effects of using triangular and pi shaped membership functions and compare their performance when using trapezoids. We start with an experiment using synthetic data and then compare the behavior of the three types of membership functions using real data which is obtained from an eldercare setting.