Finding inheritance hierarchies in fuzzy-valued concept-networks

In this paper, we extend the works of Chen and Horng (1996) and Itzkovich and Hawkes (1994) to present a new method for finding the inheritance hierarchies in fuzzy-valued concept-networks, where the relevant values (degrees of generalization or degrees of similarity) between concepts in a fuzzy-valued concept network are represented by fuzzy numbers. The proposed method is more flexible than the ones presented previously due to the fact that it allows the grades of similarity and the grades of generalization between concepts to be represented by fuzzy numbers rather than crisp real values between zero and one or interval values in [0,1].