10. A computer program product comprising a computer readable storage medium having a computer readable program stored therein, wherein the computer readable program, when executed on a question and answer (QA) system comprising a processor and a memory, causes the QA system to: analyze a superlative question to extract a superlative term in the superlative question and a focus of the superlative question; identify a metric by which to evaluate the superlative term based on one of a clue term in the superlative question or one or more portions of content of a corpus of information comprising the superlative term and focus; execute a search of the corpus to identify one or more candidate answers to the superlative question based on evidence passages in the corpus, the superlative term, the focus, and the metric; and output a final answer to the superlative question based on the one or more candidate answers, wherein the computer readable program further causes the QA system to identify the metric at least by identifying a plurality of metrics, and wherein the computer readable programmer causes QA system to execute a search of the corpus to identify one or more candidate answers to the superlative question based on evidence passages in the corpus, the superlative term, the focus, and the metric at least by performing a separate search for each metric in the plurality of metrics and generating a separate set of one or more candidate answers for each metric in the plurality of metrics.
10. A computer program product comprising a computer readable storage medium having a computer readable program stored therein, wherein the computer readable program, when executed on a question and answer (QA) system comprising a processor and a memory, causes the QA system to: analyze a superlative question to extract a superlative term in the superlative question and a focus of the superlative question; identify a metric by which to evaluate the superlative term based on one of a clue term in the superlative question or one or more portions of content of a corpus of information comprising the superlative term and focus; execute a search of the corpus to identify one or more candidate answers to the superlative question based on evidence passages in the corpus, the superlative term, the focus, and the metric; and output a final answer to the superlative question based on the one or more candidate answers, wherein the computer readable program further causes the QA system to identify the metric at least by identifying a plurality of metrics, and wherein the computer readable programmer causes QA system to execute a search of the corpus to identify one or more candidate answers to the superlative question based on evidence passages in the corpus, the superlative term, the focus, and the metric at least by performing a separate search for each metric in the plurality of metrics and generating a separate set of one or more candidate answers for each metric in the plurality of metrics. 15. The computer program product of claim 10 , wherein the computer readable program further causes the QA system to output the final answer to the superlative question based on the one or more candidate answers at least by outputting a final answer for each metric in the plurality of metrics as alternative answers to the superlative question.