In order to provide a non-factoid question answering system with improved precision, the question answering system (160) includes: a candidate retrieving unit (222), responsive to a question, extracting answer candidates from a corpus storage (178); a feature vector generating unit (232) for generating features from combinations of a question with each of the answer candidates; SVMs (176) trained to calculate a score of how correct a combination of the question with an answer candidate is, upon receiving the feature vector therefor; and an answer ranker unit (234) outputting the answer candidate with the highest calculated score as the answer. The features are generated on the basis of the results of morphological analysis and parsing of the question, a phrase in the question evaluated as being positive or negative as well as its polarity, and the semantic classes of nouns in the features.