16. A system for creating training data for a natural language processing system comprising: a processor; a training module operable to execute on the processor and further operable to obtain natural language input, the natural language input annotated with one or more important phrases, the training module further operable to generate training instances comprising a syntactic parse tree of nodes representing elements of the natural language input augmented with the annotated important phrases; and a classifier built based on the training instances with plurality of features computed for the training instances, wherein the training module is operable to generate training instances by at least creating a syntactic node, which augments the syntactic parse tree created by an information extraction pipeline, for a named mention annotated as an important phrase, responsive to determining that no existing non-terminal nodes in the syntactic parse tree span exactly the named mention, wherein a semantic meaning of a given natural language query is determined based on the augmented syntactic parse tree.
17. The system of claim 16 , wherein the plurality of features comprises one or more of lexical features, syntactic features, semantic features or corpus-based features, or combinations thereof.