Practical Applications of Data Mining

348 Chapter 8 Fuzzy InFormatIon retrIeval

Hedges act as linguistic modifiers of primary terms, such as ve r y, much,

more or less, quite, and somewhat. They are used to modify primary

terms by applying appropriate formulae to get correct membership values.

Suppose that A is a cheap membership function. Then, the following formu-

lae may be applied to obtain the membership values of cheap modified by

ver y, more or less, plus, and minus.

very cheap = cheap

2

more or less cheap = cheap

0.5

plus cheap = cheap

1.25

minus cheap = cheap

0.75

Using the base formulae above, we could create the meaning of other hedges

when applied to a primary term. We assume A to be the membership func-

tion for the primary term. Synonyms for each hedge are also pr ...