1. A method for selecting answers to natural language questions from a collection of textual documents comprising the steps of: extracting scoring features from a candidate list of passages of possible answers, wherein said scoring feature is an average distance between the beginning of a candidate answer in a passage and words in said natural language question that appear in said passage, and wherein said average distance is measured in a count of words; scoring the possible answers using the extracted scoring features and a features scoring function; and presenting the best scoring possible answer to the user with context from the passage containing the answer, wherein one or more of said steps are performed by a hardware device.