Linguistic interface is a group of linguistic terms or fuzzy descriptions that describe variables in a system utilizing corresponding membership functions. Its transparency completely or partly decides the interpretability of fuzzy models. This paper proposes a GRadiEnt-descEnt-based Transparent lInguistic iNterface Generation (GREETING) approach to overcome the disadvantage of traditional linguistic interface generation methods where the consideration of the interpretability aspects of linguistic interface is limited. In GREETING, the widely used interpretability criteria of linguistic interface are considered and optimized. The numeric experiments on the data sets from University of California, Irvine (UCI) machine learning databases demonstrate the feasibility and superiority of the proposed GREETING method. The GREETING method is also applied to fuzzy decision tree generation. It is shown that GREETING generates better transparent fuzzy decision trees in terms of better classification rates and comparable tree sizes. © 2010 IEEE.