Providing question and answers with deferred type evaluation using text with limited structure

A computer program product for automatically generating answers to questions, the computer program device comprising a non-transitory storage medium, said medium readable by a processing circuit and storing instructions run by the processing circuit for performing a method, the method comprising:

• analyzing a corpus of documents to identify a document containing a list, wherein said list contains item-delimiting markup;
• parsing said list to identify type information and entities in said list, wherein to identify said type information and entities in said list, said processing circuit further performs:
• extracting a type from a title indicating said list;
• determining a presence of item-delimeter mark-up associated with said list, each mark-up delimeter including or not including one or more associated hyperlinks, and if a hyperlink is included:
• obtaining an instance of a hyperlink in closest proximity to the mark-up item-delimeter, and extracting an entity from a target of said hyperlink instance;
• and
• if a hyperlink is not included:
• using an annotator to identify phrases included in text associated with the item-delimeter mark-up, and extracting a most salient phrase as said entity;
• creating entity-type pairs, wherein said entity-type pairs comprise said entities and the identified type from said list;
• receiving a lexical answer type associated with an input query;
• receiving a candidate answer to said query;
• determining whether said candidate answer is associated with an entity in said entity-type pairs;
• for any associated entity-type pairs, comparing said extracted type in said associated entity-type pair with said lexical answer type;
• generating a type-matching score, wherein said type-matching score is indicative of a quality of said obtained candidate answer based on matching types;
• and
• using said type-matching score to evaluate said candidate answer as an answer to said query.