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Please predict whether this patent is acceptable.PATENT ABSTRACT: A mechanism is provided in a computing device configured with instructions executing on a processor of the computing device to implement a question answering system, for answer scoring based on a combined informativity and specificity score. The question answering system, executing on the processor of the computing device and configured with a question answering machine learning model, generates a set of candidate answers for a user-generated input question. For each given candidate answer in the set of candidate answers, an informativity and specificity scorer of the question answering system determines a specificity value of each term in the given candidate answer based on a position of the term in a taxonomy data structure and determining a specificity score of the given candidate answer based on the specificity value of the terms in the given candidate answer. For each given candidate answer in the set of candidate answers, the informativity and specificity scorer determines an informativity value of each term in the given candidate answer using corpus statistics and determining an informativity score of the given candidate answer based on the informativity value of the terms in the given candidate answer. The question answering system determines a confidence score for each candidate answer within the set of candidate answers based on its specificity value and informativity value. The question answering system ranks the set of candidate answers according to confidence score to form a ranked set of candidate answers. The question answering system returns the ranked set of candidate answers.