A mechanism is provided in a question answering system for duration similarity weighting in a question answering system. The question answering system receives an input question. The question answering system generates a plurality of candidate answers to the input question using a corpus of information. The question answering system identifies a question-side duration value for the input question and identifies a policy-side duration value for a policy to be applied to an entity identified in the input question. The question answering system determines a duration similarity weight for each of the plurality of candidate answers. The question answering system applies the duration similarity weight to each of the plurality of candidate answers. The question answering system ranks the plurality of candidate answers and outputs one or more of the candidate answers.