6. A system for selecting answers to natural language questions from a collection of textual documents, comprising: a memory; and at least one processor, coupled to the memory, operative to: extract scoring features from a candidate list of passages of possible answers, wherein said scoring feature is a number of words in a candidate answer that are different than words in said natural language question; score the possible answers using the extracted scoring features and a features scoring function; and present the best scoring possible answer to the user with context from the passage containing the answer.
6. A system for selecting answers to natural language questions from a collection of textual documents, comprising: a memory; and at least one processor, coupled to the memory, operative to: extract scoring features from a candidate list of passages of possible answers, wherein said scoring feature is a number of words in a candidate answer that are different than words in said natural language question; score the possible answers using the extracted scoring features and a features scoring function; and present the best scoring possible answer to the user with context from the passage containing the answer. 7. A system as in claim 6 , wherein the feature scoring function is a linear combination of weighted features.