A system for automated question answering, comprising: a user interface configured to receive a query from a user; a question decomposition engine configured to decompose the query into one or more sub-questions and one or more contexts, and to align the sub-questions with contexts to generate question-context pairs; a query engine configured to query one or more answer resources with the question-context pairs to identify information likely to comprise an answer; and an answer generator configured to: (i) generate question-context-answer triples using the identified information from the query engine; (ii) select a generated question-context-answer triple comprising information most likely to comprise an answer to the identified sub-question; (iii) extract from the selected question-context-answer triple a portion of the associated information comprising an answer to the identified sub-question; and (iv) generate a natural language answer comprising a response to the query posed by the user.