Computing with nouns and verbs

The paper makes a case for expanding the range of words that Computing With Words typically considers to, eventually, all the words in a natural language, thus accounting accurately for the inherent vagueness of natural language meaning and creating an overlap with computational semantics. The claim is illustrated with examples of a few English nouns and verbs rather than the usual adjectives and their close derivatives.

I. Background

The main thrust of the paper is to explore how fuzzy logic applies to two classes of words in natural language that, unless they are morphologically and semantically related to scalar adjectives, do not usually appear among the computable words in fuzzy logic. We will illustrate these explorations with a couple of noun examples and a couple of motion verbs by focusing on the concepts underlying these words in their specific senses.