A formalism for representing and reasoning with linguistic information

Abstract

Conceptual graphs and fuzzy logic are two logical formalisms that emphasize the target of natural language, where conceptual graphs provide a structure of formulas close to that of natural language sentences while fuzzy logic provides a methodology for computing with words. This paper proposes fuzzy conceptual graphs as a knowledge representation language that combines the advantages of both the two formalisms for artificial intelligence approaching human expression and reasoning. Firstly, the conceptual graph language is extended with functional relation types for representing functional dependency, and conjunctive types for joining concepts and relations. Then fuzzy conceptual graphs are formulated as a generalization of conceptual graphs where fuzzy types and fuzzy attribute-values are used in place of crisp types and crisp attribute-values. Projection and join as basic operations for reasoning on fuzzy conceptual graphs are defined, taking into account the semantics of fuzzy set-based values.