Correlated Linguistic Information Aggregation

Linguistic information aggregation has received great attention from researchers, and a variety of operators have been developed for aggregating linguistic information. All the existing linguistic information aggregation operators only consider the situations where all the aggregated linguistic arguments are independent, i.e., they only consider the addition of the importance of individual linguistic arguments, however, in some actual situations, the considered linguistic arguments may be correlative. In this paper, we focus on this issue. Motivated by the idea of the well-known Choquet integrals,1 we propose two new linguistic information aggregation operators called the linguistic correlated averaging operator and linguistic correlated geometric operator. In the special cases where the aggregated linguistic arguments are independent, the linguistic correlated averaging operator can be reduced to a variety of traditional linguistic averaging aggregation operators; while the linguistic correlated geometric operator can be reduced to a variety of the traditional linguistic geometric aggregation operators. Furthermore, we extend the above results to accommodate uncertain linguistic environments, and illustrate them with a practical problem.