Compound Bipolar Queries: A Step Towards an Enhanced Human Consistency and Human Friendliness

Abstract

Database querying is a basic capability to make use of databases that are omnipresent and huge. A crucial problem is how to make possible for an ordinary human user to properly express his intentions and preferences as to what should be searched for. As natural language, with its inherent imprecision, is the only fully natural human means of communication and articulation, this makes difficult the use of traditional binary logic based querying tools. Fuzzy logic can come to the rescue, notably using fuzzy logic with linguistic quantifiers. Such queries, proposed by Kacprzyk and Ziolkowski [24], Kacprzyk et al. [25], have offered much in this context, and will also be used here. While looking for further solutions in this direction, the concept of a bipolar query has been proposed by Dubois and Prade [13], followed by a fuzzy bipolar query due to Zadrozny [36] (cf. Zadrozny and Kacprzyk [40]) involving negative and positive information, notably meant as required and desired conditions. A natural solution consisting in combining these two ideas was proposed conceptually by Kacprzyk and Zadrozny [22], and termed a compound bipolar query. In this paper we further extend this concept mainly by exploring some additional aggregation related aspects of bipolar queries which include fuzzy queries with linguistic quantifiers.