As the guest editors of the special issue on Hesitant Fuzzy Linguistic Decision Making: Algorithms, Theory and Applications, we would like to publish the latest, innovative, and outstanding research results in the International Journal of Fuzzy Systems (IJFS). Hesitant fuzzy linguistic decision making is an interdisciplinary research area attracting practitioners and researchers from psychologists, economists, to computer scientists. It has enabled the analysis and computing of linguistic expressions with uncertainties, and opened the door for the possibility to develop more comprehensive and powerful decision theories and methods based on linguistic knowledge. Lots of new approaches and proposals for decision making problems have risen to overcome the limitations of previous linguistic decision making approaches.

The call for papers of this special issue was during April, 2017–October 2017. The objective of this special issue is to explore up-to-date modeling, analysis, computation and synthesis of algorithms and approaches to hesitant fuzzy linguistic decision making problems and their applications. Totally 17 papers were selected for publication in this IJFS special issue from 54 submissions according to the review criterion on completeness and technical contributions and asked for quality improvements according to the reviewers’ comments. These papers provide interesting and timely innovative results covering a state-of-the-art survey on hesitant fuzzy linguistic term set and its application in decision making, distance and entropy measures for hesitant fuzzy linguistic term sets and their applications, hesitant fuzzy linguistic multi-criteria decision-making approaches based on regret theory, projection model, MABAC method, PROMETHEE method, case-based reasoning decision-making model and DEMATEL method, hesitant fuzzy linguistic AHP, consistency and consensus models for hesitant fuzzy linguistic preference relations and the extensions of hesitant fuzzy linguistic term set such as probabilistic linguistic term set, interval-valued hesitant fuzzy linguistic term set, hesitant fuzzy 2-dimension linguistic term set, hesitant fuzzy linguistic term soft sets and hesitant interval neutrosophic uncertain linguistic term set. These papers bring a rich collection of hesitant fuzzy linguistic decision making theory and applications.

As the guest editors of this special issue, we would like to acknowledge all the contributors to this special issue.