Computing with Words for Decision Making Versus Linguistic Decision Making: A Reflection on both Scenarios

Computing with Words (CW) methodology has been used in different environments to narrow the differences between human reasoning and computing. As decision making is a typical human mental process, it seems natural to apply the CW methodology in order to create and enrich decision models in which the information involved has a qualitative nature. There are two approaches to manage linguistic information in decision making. The first one uses a CW methodology that allows experts to elicit linguistic evaluations and obtains final results as a linguistic representation of words enriched by any kind of representation. The other one uses linguistic information as inputs together with computing processes whose outcome is a ranking of alternatives based on numerical outputs. We can summarize both approaches in the two following expressions from words to words versus from words to numerical outputs/ranking. Both scenarios will be revisited in this chapter within the context of the linguistic computational models for processing linguistic information in decision making.