20. The system as claimed in claim 18 , wherein said retrieving said plurality of supporting passages and generating a confidence score for each candidate answer based on said supporting passages occurs in parallel operations.
20. The system as claimed in claim 18 , wherein said retrieving said plurality of supporting passages and generating a confidence score for each candidate answer based on said supporting passages occurs in parallel operations. 21. The system as claimed in claim 20 , wherein said hardware processor is further configured to conduct, in parallel, one or more analyses in a plurality of scoring modules to each produce a confidence score, wherein said confidence score comprises one or more of: conduct, in parallel, one or more analyses in each of a plurality of scoring modules to each produce a score, wherein said score comprises one or more of: a term match score obtained by counting a number of query terms in a passage; and determining if said number matches a number of terms in a candidate answer, or a textual alignment score obtained by determining if a placement of words in said passages are in alignment with a placement of words of said candidate answers, or a deeper analysis score obtained by determining a meaning of the passage and the input query; and computing a degree of satisfying a lexical or a semantic relation in the passage.