1. An apparatus for evaluating a semantic proximity between a question consisting of a string of natural language text presented in a candidate free-form text request received from a user, and a reference free-form text entry consisting of a string of natural language text, comprising: a data store; a plurality of reference free-form text entries residing in the data store, each reference free-form text entry in the form of a question expressed as a string of natural language text associated with an answer to the question; a user interface adapted to receive a candidate free-form text entry; and a processing engine, including: a compiler module programmed to receive and compile one or more of the reference free-form text entries to form one or more reference patterns corresponding to the reference free-form text entries; a transformer module programmed to transform candidate free-form text entries into candidate rephrased objects; and a matcher module programmed to compare the candidate rephrased objects to the reference patterns, and to calculate and output a score representing a semantic proximity between the candidate rephrased objects and the reference patterns.