A method and a system for automatically finding one or more answers to a
natural language question in a computer stored natural language text
database is disclosed. The natural language text database has been
analyzed with respect to syntactic functions of constituents, lexical
meaning of word tokens and clause boundaries, and the natural language
question comprises a question clause. A computer readable representation
of the question clause is analyzed with respect to syntactic functions of
its constituents and the lexical meaning of its word tokens. In response
to the analysis a set of conditions for a clause in the natural language
text database to constitute an answer to the question clause is defined.
The conditions relate to the syntactic functions of constituents and the
lexical meaning of word tokens in the clause. Furthermore, clauses that
satisfy said conditions are identified in the natural language text
database, and answers to the question clause is returned by means of the
identified clauses that matches the conditions.