15. 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 implement question answering system configured with a natural language processing pipeline executing on the computing device for class narrowing for answer lookups, wherein the instructions cause the processor to: receive, by a question and topic analysis stage of the natural language processing pipeline, an input question; annotate, by the question and topic analysis stage of the natural language processing pipeline, the input question with a verb in the input question and a syntactic relation between the verb and a focus of the question; find, by a class narrowing component of the natural language processing pipeline, an entry in a verb/type lookup resource corresponding to the verb and the syntactic relation, wherein the entry comprises the verb, the syntactic relation, and a set of classes, wherein each given class in the set of classes has a corresponding frequency value representing a frequency the given class occurs with the syntactic relation to the verb; perform, by the class narrowing component, class-narrowed type-restricted answer lookup from a topology based on the entry in the verb/type lookup resource to generate a set of candidate answers; score, by a hypothesis and evidence scoring stages of the natural language processing pipeline, the set of candidate answers to generate for each candidate answer a confidence score; rank, by an answer ranking stage of the natural language processing pipeline, the set of candidate answers by confidence score to form a ranked set of candidate answers; and output, by the natural language processing pipeline, the ranked set of candidate answers.
15. 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 implement question answering system configured with a natural language processing pipeline executing on the computing device for class narrowing for answer lookups, wherein the instructions cause the processor to: receive, by a question and topic analysis stage of the natural language processing pipeline, an input question; annotate, by the question and topic analysis stage of the natural language processing pipeline, the input question with a verb in the input question and a syntactic relation between the verb and a focus of the question; find, by a class narrowing component of the natural language processing pipeline, an entry in a verb/type lookup resource corresponding to the verb and the syntactic relation, wherein the entry comprises the verb, the syntactic relation, and a set of classes, wherein each given class in the set of classes has a corresponding frequency value representing a frequency the given class occurs with the syntactic relation to the verb; perform, by the class narrowing component, class-narrowed type-restricted answer lookup from a topology based on the entry in the verb/type lookup resource to generate a set of candidate answers; score, by a hypothesis and evidence scoring stages of the natural language processing pipeline, the set of candidate answers to generate for each candidate answer a confidence score; rank, by an answer ranking stage of the natural language processing pipeline, the set of candidate answers by confidence score to form a ranked set of candidate answers; and output, by the natural language processing pipeline, the ranked set of candidate answers. 16. The apparatus of claim 15 , wherein performing the class-narrowed type-restricted answer lookup comprises: selecting a class within the set of classes; identifying a set of entities in a topology connected to at least one entity in the question that are at most a predetermined number of hops from the at least one entity in the question and are of the selected class; and adding the set of entities to the set of candidate answers.