4. The computer-implemented method of claim 1 , further comprising selecting, based on the scores, one or more answers to respond to the query from among the candidate topic-answer pairs.
4. The computer-implemented method of claim 1 , further comprising selecting, based on the scores, one or more answers to respond to the query from among the candidate topic-answer pairs. 5. The computer-implemented method of claim 4 , wherein the one or more selected answers includes an answer from the candidate topic-answer pair that has a highest score among the scores of each of the candidate topic-answer pairs.