Abstract: In this paper, we present a new prioritized information fusion method for handling fuzzy information retrieval problems in the generalized fuzzy number environment, where generalized fuzzy numbers are used to represent the degrees of strength with which documents satisfy particular criteria. The proposed prioritized information fusion method can retrieve documents more analogous to the intuition of the human being than Chen-and-Chen's method [8] and Yager's method [21]. It can overcome their drawbacks for dealing with document retrieval.
Keywords: Prioritized information fusion, generalized trapezoidal fuzzy numbers, center-of-gravity method, fuzzy information retrieval