1. A method, in a data processing system, for duration similarity weighting in a question answering system, the method comprising: receiving an input question concerning an entity; generating a plurality of candidate answers to the input question using a corpus of information; identifying a question-side duration value for the entity identified in the input question; identifying a policy-side duration value for a policy applied to the entity to generate each of the plurality of candidate answers; determining a duration similarity weight for each of the plurality of candidate answers based on a similarity between the question-side duration value and the policy-side duration value; applying the duration similarity weight of the plurality of candidate answers; ranking the plurality of candidate answers based on applying the duration similarity weight to each of the plurality of candidate answers; and outputting one or more of the candidate answers based on the ranking.