Affect, judgment and decision making: Some inspirations for bipolar querying

The concept of a bipolar query, meant as a database query that involves both positive and negative conditions is discussed from the point of view of flexible database querying. A new possible perspective is outlined which is related to the modeling of affects that play a crucial role in real world human centric decision making, and are also known to involve a positive and negative valuation which are the crucial elements of bipolar queries. The aggregation of the matching degrees against the negative and positive conditions to derive an overall matching degree is considered taking into account the Lacroix and Lavency approach for bipolar queries as the point of departure. It is shown that the use of a multiple valued logic based formalism for the representation of positive and negative evaluations boils down to a logical type evaluation function that is in line with Grabisch, Greco and Pirlot´s general approach to bivariate bipolar multicriteria decision making. Then, an affective computing perspective - in its affect and judgment related setting that is decision making oriented - is outlined and advocated.