A computer-implemented method for ranking answers of question-answer pairs in ground truth. The computer-implemented method includes annotating, via an annotation tool, the domain dictionary, including, at least one or more of lexicons, glossaries, knowledge base query for ranking the question-answer pairs. The computer-implemented method further includes defining search patterns of the annotated domain dictionary. The computer-implemented method further includes searching a documents corpus or knowledge based query of the domain dictionary for candidate answers of the question-answer pairs, based on the defined search patterns, the candidate are returned based on the search. The computer-implemented method for evaluating the candidate answers with the annotation tool to verify correctness or acceptability of the returned candidate answers based on the search.