Approaches are proposed to allow fuzzy terms to be interpreted according to the context within which they are used. Such an interpretation is natural and useful. A query-dependent interpretation is proposed to allow a fuzzy term to be interpreted relative to a partial answer of a query. A scaling process is used to transform a pre-defined meaning of a fuzzy term into on appropriate meaning in the given context. Sufficient conditions are given for a nested fuzzy query with RELATIVE quantifiers to be unnested for an efficient evaluation. An attribute-dependent interpretation is proposed to model the applications in which the meaning of a fuzzy term in an attribute must be interpreted with respect to values in other related attributes. Two necessary and sufficient conditions for a tuple to have a unique attribute-dependent interpretation are provided. We describe an interpretation system that allows queries to be processed based on the attribute-dependent interpretation of the data. Two techniques, grouping and shifting, are proposed to improve the implementation. >
['Weining Zhang', 'Clement T. Yu', 'Bryan B. Reagan', 'Hiroshi Nakajima']
Context-dependent interpretations of linguistic terms in fuzzy relational databases