1. A method, in a data processing system configured with a natural language processing pipeline executing on at least one processor of the data processing system, for class narrowing for answer lookups, the method comprising: annotating, by the natural language processing pipeline, an input question with a verb in the input question and a syntactic relation between the verb and a focus of the question; finding, by a class narrowing component of the natural language processing pipeline, an entry in a verb/type lookup resource corresponding to the verb and the syntactic relation, wherein the entry comprises the verb, the syntactic relation, and a set of classes, wherein each given class in the set of classes has a corresponding frequency value representing a frequency the given class occurs with the syntactic relation to the verb; and performing, by the class narrowing component, class-narrowed type-restricted answer lookup from a topology based on the entry in the verb/type lookup resource to generate a set of candidate answers.