15. The system of claim 14 wherein the step of constructing the character segmented features list further comprises: back tracking to trace operations in the act of comparing to identify correspondence between a feature in the input phrase and a prototype feature in a character set in the reference phrase; and locating segmentation points between features in adjacent character feature sets.
14. The system of claim 13 wherein the step of matching features further comprises: comparing a string of features identified from the input phrase to a string of prototype features for each reference phrase in a lexicon to generate the holistic answer list.