SYSTEM AND METHOD FOR PROVIDING QUESTION AND ANSWERS WITH DEFERRED TYPE EVALUATION

A system, method and computer program product for conducting questions and answers with deferred type evaluation based on any corpus of data. The method includes processing a query including waiting until a “Type” is determined AND a candidate answer is provided; the Type is not required as part of a predetermined ontology but is a lexical/grammatical item. Then, a search is conducted for evidence that the candidate answer has the required LAT (e.g., as determined by a matching function leveraging a parser, a semantic interpreter and/or a pattern matcher). Alternately, the LAT may be matched to a known Ontological Type and then a candidate answer searched in an knowledge-base or database determined by that type. Then, all the evidence from all the different ways to determine that the candidate answer has the expected lexical answer type (LAT) is combined and one or more answers provided.