A mechanism is provided for generating candidate answers to an explanatory question. Responsive to identifying an input question as the explanatory question, the explanatory question is decomposed into one or more explanatory queries. One or more passages are identified within a corpus of information that comprises an explanatory clause that provides an explanatory answer to the explanatory question based on pre-determined explanatory clause terms. Hypothesis evidence is received with one or passages comprising explanatory clauses from the corpus of information. One or more candidate explanatory answers are generated based on hypothesis evidence. The candidate explanatory answers are ranked and merged. Finally, the candidate explanatory answers are output.
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