24. The system of claim 17 , wherein said candidate answer comprises a candidate answer string, said matching the candidate answer to a first instance in the ontology comprises: accessing a resource having ontological content; obtaining one or more types from said resource that match said candidate answer string; and accessing a data corpus, and obtaining from said data corpus a ranked list of first instances based on a frequency of occurrence of said one or more types therein.
24. The system of claim 17 , wherein said candidate answer comprises a candidate answer string, said matching the candidate answer to a first instance in the ontology comprises: accessing a resource having ontological content; obtaining one or more types from said resource that match said candidate answer string; and accessing a data corpus, and obtaining from said data corpus a ranked list of first instances based on a frequency of occurrence of said one or more types therein. 25. The system of claim 24 , wherein said matching the candidate answer to a first instance in the ontology further comprises: accessing said resource having ontological content; identifying a context in said input query; computing a similarity measure between the identified context of said input query and contextual data associated with the obtained types from the ontological content.