Computing With Words for Student Strategy Evaluation in an Examination

In the framework of Granular Computing (GC), Interval type 2 Fuzzy Sets (IT2 FSs) play a prominent role by facilitating a better representation of uncertain linguistic information. Perceptual Computing (Per C), a well known computing with words (CWW) approach, and its various applications have nicely exploited this advantage. This paper reports a novel Per C based approach for student strategy evaluation. Examinations are generally oriented to test the subject knowledge of students. The number of questions that they are able to solve accurately judges success rates of students in the examinations. However, we feel that not only the solutions of questions, but also the strategy adopted for finding those solutions are equally important. More marks should be awarded to a student, who solves a question with a better strategy compared to a student, whose strategy is relatively not that good. Furthermore, the students strategy can be taken as a measure of his or her learning outcome as perceived by a faculty member. This can help to identify students, whose learning outcomes are not good, and, thus, can be provided with any relevant help, for improvement. The main contribution of this paper is to illustrate the use of CWW for student strategy evaluation and present a comparison of the recommendations generated by different CWW approaches. CWW provides us with two major advantages. First, it generates a numeric score for the overall evaluation of strategy adopted by a student in the examination. This enables comparison and ranking of the students based on their performances. Second, a linguistic evaluation describing the student strategy is also obtained from the system. Both these numeric score and linguistic recommendation are together used to assess the quality of a students strategy. We found that Per-C generates unique recommendations in all cases and outperforms other CWW approaches.

Parallel processor scheduling: formulation as multi-objective linguistic optimization and solution using Perceptual Reasoning based methodology

In the era of Industry 4.0, the focus is on the minimization of human element and maximizing the automation in almost all the industrial and manufacturing establishments. These establishments contain numerous processing systems, which can execute a number of tasks, in parallel with minimum number of human beings. This parallel execution of tasks is done in accordance to a scheduling policy. However, the minimization of human element beyond a certain point is difficult. In fact, the expertise and experience of a group of humans, called the experts, becomes imminent to design a fruitful scheduling policy. The aim of the scheduling policy is to achieve the optimal value of an objective, like production time, cost, etc. In real-life situations, there are more often than not, multiple objectives in any parallel processing scenario. Furthermore, the experts generally provide their opinions, about various scheduling criteria (pertaining to the scheduling policies) in linguistic terms or words. Word semantics are best modeled using fuzzy sets (FSs). Thus, all these factors have motivated us to model the parallel processing scenario as a multi-objective linguistic optimization problem (MOLOP) and use the novel perceptual reasoning (PR) based methodology for solving it. We have also compared the results of the PR based solution methodology with those obtained from the 2-tuple based solution methodology. PR based solution methodology offers three main advantages viz., it generates unique recommendations, here the linguistic recommendations match a codebook word, and also the word model comes before the word. 2-tuple based solution methodology fails to give all these advantages. Thus, we feel that our work is novel and will provide directions for the future research.

Perceptual reasoning based solution methodology for linguistic optimization problems

Decision making in real-life scenarios may often be modeled as an optimization problem. It requires the consideration of various attributes like human preferences and thinking, which constrain achieving the optimal value of the problem objectives. The value of the objectives may be maximized or minimized, depending on the situation. Numerous times, the values of these problem parameters are in linguistic form, as human beings naturally understand and express themselves using words. These problems are therefore termed as linguistic optimization problems (LOPs), and are of two types, namely single objective linguistic optimization problems (SOLOPs) and multi-objective linguistic optimization problems (MOLOPs). In these LOPs, the value of the objective function(s) may not be known at all points of the decision space, and therefore, the objective function(s) as well as problem constraints are linked by the if-then rules. Tsukamoto inference method has been used to solve these LOPs; however, it suffers from drawbacks. As, the use of linguistic information inevitably calls for the utilization of computing with words (CWW), and therefore, 2-tuple linguistic model based solution methodologies were proposed for LOPs. However, we found that 2-tuple linguistic model based solution methodologies represent the semantics of the linguistic information using a combination of type-1 fuzzy sets and ordinal term sets. As, the semantics of linguistic information are best modeled using the interval type-2 fuzzy sets, hence we propose solution methodologies for LOPs based on CWW approach of perceptual computing, in this paper. The perceptual computing based solution methodologies use a novel design of CWW engine, called the perceptual reasoning (PR). PR in the current form is suitable for solving SOLOPs and, hence, we have also extended it to the MOLOPs.

An empirical study of computing with words approaches for multi-person and single-person systems

Computing with words (CWW) has emerged as a powerful tool for processing the linguistic information, especially the one generated by human beings. Various CWW approaches have emerged since the inception of CWW, such as perceptual computing, extension principle based CWW approach, symbolic method based CWW approach, and 2-tuple based CWW approach. Furthermore, perceptual computing can use interval approach (IA), enhanced interval approach (EIA), or Hao-Mendel approach (HMA), for data processing. There have been numerous works in which HMA was shown to be better at word modelling than EIA, and EIA better than IA. But, a deeper study of these works reveals that HMA captures lesser fuzziness than the EIA or IA. Thus, we feel that EIA is more suited for word modelling in multi-person systems and HMA for single-person systems (as EIA is an improvement over IA). Furthermore, another set of works, compared the performances perceptual computing to the other above said CWW approaches. In all these works, perceptual computing was shown to be better than other CWW approaches. However, none of the works tried to investigate the reason behind this observed better performance of perceptual computing. Also, no comparison has been performed for scenarios where the inputs are differentially weighted. Thus, the aim of this work is to empirically establish that EIA is suitable for multi-person systems and HMA for single-person systems. Another dimension of this work is also to empirically prove that perceptual computing gives better performance than other CWW approaches based on extension principle, symbolic method and 2-tuple especially in scenarios where inputs are differentially weighted.