Automated question answering is disclosed that relates to the selection of an answer to a question from a pool of potential answers which are manually or automatically extracted from a large collection of textual documents. The a feature extraction component, a feature combination component, an answer selection component, and an answer presentation component, among others, are included. The input to the system is a set of one or more natural language questions and a collection of textual document The output is a (possibly ranked) set of factual answers to the questions, these answers being extracted from the document collection.