The invention provides a candidate response evaluation device and method, query response equipment and method and a storage medium. The candidate response evaluation method comprises the following steps: making the candidate response evaluation device acquire semantic information of query input by a user and semantic information of candidate response specific to the query of the user; and estimating the future value of the candidate response by an expected performance network method based on the semantic information of the query and the semantic information of the candidate response to generate the estimated value of the future value, wherein the future value represents the quality of the candidate response relative to the query, and the expected performance network method is estimated byat least one of context information of the query and the candidate response, a length vector of the candidate response, and prediction probability representing the matching degree between the candidate response and the query. Through adoption of the query response equipment including the candidate response evaluation device, quality and diversity of the response can be improved while the reasoningefficiency can be maintained.