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 a number of words in a candidate answer that are different than words in said natural language question; 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.