Fuzzy Quantifiers: A Computational Theory

"Almost all", "many", "some": fuzzy quantifiers are vital for effective communication in natural language (NL). This monograph pursues an axiomatic method to achieve a reliable interpretation of these quantifiers in technical applications of fuzzy quantification. Unlike existing work in this area, it targets a much broader class of quantificational phenomena which includes all cases usually considered in linguistics. The topics addressed in the monograph run the gamut from the introduction of the theoretical framework for analysing fuzzy quantification, the formalization of semantical requirements on models of fuzzy quantification, the construction and detailed study of prototypical models which conform to the linguistic desiderata, the development of algorithms for implementing the main types of quantifiers in these models, and finally a preview to fuzzy branching quantifications which might be necessary for modelling NL sentences involving more than one quantifier. The material will be of interest to those working at the crossroads of natural language and fuzzy set theory. The fields of application comprise fuzzy information aggregation and data fusion, flexible database querying and fuzzy information retrieval, multi-criteria decision-making and linguistic data summarization.

Ingo Glöckner received his M.A. in Computational Linguistics and Artificial Intelligence from University of Osnabrück in 1996. He then became a research assistant at the University of Bielefeld, where he pursued research on fuzzy set theory and its application to information retrieval. In 2003, I. Glöckner received his PhD for his thesis on the semantical interpretation and implementation of fuzzy quantifiers. He then joined the Intelligent Information and Communication Systems Group (Prakt. Informatik VII) of Prof. H. Helbig at the FernUniversität in Hagen. His current research activities are centered on the representation and processing of knowledge expressed in natural language.