RANKING FOR EFFICIENT FACTUAL QUESTION ANSWERING

Methods and systems are provided for improving efficiency and precision in factual question answering in a search environment. In aspects, the methods and systems involve offline identification of answers correlated with one or more factual questions that are generated offline for each document within a document collection. Thereafter, upon receiving a factoid query during runtime, candidate documents that are retrieved in response to the factoid query are scanned for a factual question that matches the factoid query. For each factual question that matches the factoid query, a corresponding candidate answer can be identified. Thereafter, each candidate answer can be assigned a score that is a function of the number of candidate documents in which the candidate answer was identified and the relevancy of those candidate documents to the factoid query. The candidate answer having the highest score can be provided to the user in response to the factoid query.