Scoring candidate evidence passages for criteria validation. Evidence data associated with a criteria, such that the evidence data entries include a decision indicator indicating that the criteria is either met or not met by the evidence data, is collected. Candidate evidences, making up a corpus of data associated with the criteria, against which the criteria is to be validated, are generated. Each candidate evidence is evaluated against the evidence data. A score indicating the validity of the criteria with respect to the candidate evidence is generated, based on the decision indicators associated with the evidence data entries.