An approach is provided to provide communication between a user and a question answering (QA) system using a persona. A persona-based profile is identified to utilize in a conversation between the user and the QA system with the persona being relevance and/or sentiment based. A question is received at the QA system from the user. The QA system retrieves candidate answers which are compared to the persona-based profile. The candidate answers are scored based on the comparison. One or more of the candidate answers are selected based on the scores and these candidate answers are provided to the user.