17. An apparatus comprising: a processor; and a memory coupled to the processor, wherein the memory comprises instructions which, when executed by the processor, cause the processor to: identify a set of features that contribute to generating candidate answers for input questions; identify a set of annotation engines in the ingestion pipeline that contribute to each of the set of features and at least one annotation engine on which the one or more annotation engines depend; generate a sub-pipeline for each set of annotation engines to form a plurality of sub-pipelines of annotation engines; receive new content to be ingested into a corpus of information; apply a plurality of sub-pipelines of annotation engines against the new content in order of effectiveness, wherein the plurality of sub-pipelines include all annotation engines of an ingestion pipeline and wherein each sub-pipeline within the plurality of sub-pipelines generates one or more intermediate output objects; and provide access to the one or more intermediate output objects, wherein the one or more intermediate output objects represent the partially ingested new content.
17. An apparatus comprising: a processor; and a memory coupled to the processor, wherein the memory comprises instructions which, when executed by the processor, cause the processor to: identify a set of features that contribute to generating candidate answers for input questions; identify a set of annotation engines in the ingestion pipeline that contribute to each of the set of features and at least one annotation engine on which the one or more annotation engines depend; generate a sub-pipeline for each set of annotation engines to form a plurality of sub-pipelines of annotation engines; receive new content to be ingested into a corpus of information; apply a plurality of sub-pipelines of annotation engines against the new content in order of effectiveness, wherein the plurality of sub-pipelines include all annotation engines of an ingestion pipeline and wherein each sub-pipeline within the plurality of sub-pipelines generates one or more intermediate output objects; and provide access to the one or more intermediate output objects, wherein the one or more intermediate output objects represent the partially ingested new content. 19. The apparatus of claim 17 , wherein providing access to the one or more intermediate output objects comprises mapping the new content being ingested to the one or more intermediate output objects, wherein the instructions further cause the processor to: responsive to receiving an input question in a question answering system, run a question answering pipeline of software engines against available partially and fully ingested content according to the mapping; generate one or more candidate answers for the input question; rank the one or more candidate answers; and present the ranked one or more candidate answers.