Generalizing linguistic distributions in hesitant decision context

The hesitant fuzzy linguistic term set (HFLTS) and the linguistic distribution (LD) are becoming popular tools to describe decision makers’ linguistic preferences. By combining HFLTS and LD, this paper proposes a new concept called hesitant linguistic distribution (HLD), and then presents the transformation between HLDs and LDs and the basic comparison and aggregation operations to perform on HLDs. Following, comparisons among several linguistic expressions are made. Finally, the use and behavior mechanism of HLD in multiple attribute group decision making is demonstrated.