A natural language question answering method and apparatus belong to the field of information retrieval and processing. The method includes: acquiring a natural language question N; converting the natural language question N into a query semantic graph Qs, each edge in the query semantic graph Qs representing one semantic relation in the natural language question N; searching an RDF graph G for a subgraph matching the query semantic graph Qs; and obtaining an answer to the natural language question N according to the subgraph.