Generating Answer Variants Based on Tables of a Corpus

Mechanisms are provided for implementing a candidate answer variant engine. The mechanisms receive an indication of a structured portion of content in a corpus, generate a plurality of groupings of elements of the structured portion of content, and generate, for each grouping of elements in the plurality of groupings of elements, and for each element in the grouping of elements, a corresponding grouping vector representation, corresponding to the element. The mechanisms, for each grouping vector representation of each grouping of elements in the plurality of groupings of elements perform a similarity measure calculation between the grouping vector representation and a vector representation of an input question, and select an element corresponding to the grouping vector representation for inclusion as a candidate answer variant based on results of the similarity measure calculation. The mechanisms perform question answering operations based on an analysis of one or more candidate answer variants.