9. A non-transitory computer readable storage medium as in claim 8 wherein the answering system comprises an information extraction plugin configured to derive the semantics from the user query.
8. A non-transitory computer readable storage medium embodying a computer program for performing a method, said method comprising: causing an answering system to receive a user query posed in a natural language to a database; causing the answering system to derive semantics from the user query and create a parse graph, wherein the semantics comprise a first dimension and a second dimension; perform normalization and transformation of the semantics; imposing constraints on the semantics to create artifacts by proposing a related measure connecting the first dimension and the second dimension in a database table; mapping the artifacts into a plurality of structured queries; ranking the plurality of structured queries according to a first scoring function considering a selectivity of the related measure, a second scoring function considering a complexity of the structured query such that a more complex query structure indicates a higher relevance, a third scoring function comprising a confidence measure based on text retrieval metrics, and a fourth scoring function comprising a popularity of the first dimension, the second dimension, and the related measure; and executing the plurality of structured queries on the database according to the ranking.