| Summary: | Modeling qualitative distance words is important for natural language understanding, scene reconstruction and many decision support systems (DSSs) based on a geographic information system (GIS). However, it is difficult to establish the relationship between qualitative distance words and quantitative distance for special applications since the meanings of these words are influenced by both subjective and objective factors. Some existing methods are reviewed, and the Hao–Mendel approach (HMA) is improved to model qualitative distance words for four travel modes by using interval type-2 fuzzy sets (IT2 FSs), aiming at addressing the individual and interpersonal uncertainty among qualitative distance words. The area of the footprint of uncertainty (FOU), fuzziness (entropy), and variance are adopted to measure the uncertainties of qualitative distance words. The experimental results show that the improved HMA algorithm is better than the original HMA algorithm and can be used in spatial information retrieval and GIS-based DSSs.
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