Entity-relation based passage scoring in a question answering computer system

According to an aspect, a query and a passage are parsed by a language parser to detect noun-centric phrases and verb-centric phrases in the query and the passage. Entities, including at least one untyped entity, are identified based on the noun-centric phrases and relations are identified based on the verb-centric phrases. Entity pairs are created that include an entity identified in the query and an entity identified in the passage, each pair satisfies a matching criteria. Relation pairs are created that include a relation identified in the query and a relation identified in the passage, each pair satisfies a matching criteria. A passage score that indicates the likelihood that an answer to the query is contained in the passage is determined based on the entity pairs, the matching criteria satisfied by each entity pair, the elation pairs, and the matching criteria satisfied by each relation pair.